In the 2003 Civil War movie Gods and
Generals, the character of Colonel Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, a famous Union
officer, gives a brief, stirring speech to his brother, Tom, about slavery and
the Confederate cause. In his short speech, Chamberlain presents a strong
argument against the Confederate position. Says Chamberlain,

Now, somewhere out
there is the Confederate army. They claim they are fighting for their
independence, for their freedom. Now, I cannot question their integrity. I
believe they are wrong, but I do not question it. But I do question the system
that defends its own freedom while it denies it to others, to an entire race of
men. I will admit it, Tom, war is a scourge, but so is slavery. It is the
systematic coercion of one group of men over another.

Many people find this argument simple,
logical, and powerful. After all, wasn't it inconsistent for the Confederates
to claim they were fighting for freedom and independence when at the same time
they were keeping another group of people in bondage? Yes, this is a valid
argument--up to a point. But it's also an incomplete argument, and in some ways
it’s an unfair argument. One reason this argument is both incomplete and unfair
is that it ignores major inconsistencies in the North’s position.For example, one could ask tough, critical
questions about the North’s claim that it was fighting for freedom and for the
preservation of the Union:

* How could the North claim it was fighting
for freedom when the Union army was forcing Southern slaves to fight against
their will, even when those slaves made it clear they didn't want to leave
their plantations and didn't want to fight for the North?

* How could the North claim it was fighting
for freedom when four of the Northern states were slave states and when some
Northern states wouldn't even allow free blacks to settle within their
boundaries?

* How could the North claim it was fighting
for freedom when it was trying to crush an independence movement? To put it
another way, how could the North claim it was fighting for freedom when it was
trying to conquer eleven states that had left the Union in a peaceful, democratic
manner and that simply wanted to be left alone?

* How could the North claim it was justified
in fighting to preserve the Union when the original Union was a voluntary
compact between the states, and when the founding fathers had prohibited the
federal government from using force against any of the states? Even President
James Buchanan, who was president when the Deep South states seceded, said the
federal government had no authority to use force against the seceded states.
How can one rightfully attempt to preserve a democratic union by waging war to
force eleven of its members to remain in it against their will?

* Wasn’t the North’s use of force against
the Southern states fundamentally contrary to the Declaration of Independence,
which says that governments derive their just powers "from the consent of
the governed" and that a people have the natural, God-given right to sever
existing political ties, to establish their own government, and to take their
place among the family of nations?

A key argument that is implied in the movie
character's criticism is that the South did not deserve to be independent
because slavery existed within its borders. Critics argue that not only was the
South's position inconsistent, but that the Southern states had no moral right
to be independent and that therefore the North's invasion was justified.

No Moral Right to Independence?

Did the South have no moral right to be
independent because it permitted and upheld slavery? There's no doubt that
slavery was wrong and that it needed to be abolished. But, if the Southern
states had no right to form their own government because slavery existed within
their borders, then the American colonies had no right to form their own
government either, since slavery existed in the colonies and since some of the
colonies (especially the New England colonies) upheld and grew rich from the
slave trade. British leaders noted this inconsistency during the American
Revolution. They pointed out that some of the colonial leaders who were loudly
demanding "freedom and independence" were slaveowners. If the
existence of slavery within a nation's borders means that nation has no right
to exist, then America had no right to exist in the first place. In fact, the
slaves may have been freed over thirty years sooner if the British had won the
war, since England abolished slavery in 1833.

Every nation and region has its share of
social injustices, and the South was certainly no exception. But what about the
North? For starters, the New England states made large fortunes from the slave
trade and from industries associated with that trade. Nearly all American slave
ships were Northern-owned and operated from Northern ports.Some Northern states continued to profit from
the slave trade until just before the war started (John Tilley, The Coming
of the Glory, Springfield, Tennessee: Nippert Publishing, 1995, reprint,
pp. 1-13). Conditions on the New England slave ships were horrible. The slaves
were kept below deck in cramped quarters and forced to sit or lie in their own
urine and defecation. Not surprisingly, disease was rampant. The slaves were
chained together by twos, hands and feet, and had no room to move around. Tens
of thousands of slaves died on those slave ships.In fact, the number of slaves who died on slave ships was far,
far greater than the number of slaves who died from mistreatment on Southern
plantations.

The North was home to a cruel form of wage
slavery where factory workers, especially those who were immigrants, worked in
terrible conditions for wages that were barely sufficient for basic existence.
These workers were usually cast aside as soon as they ceased to be productive.
On the other hand, many if not most slaves were fed, clothed, and housed for
the duration of their lives, even after they grew old and could no longer
work.Even some modern scholars agree
that many Northern wage-slave factory workers were materially worse off than
most Southern plantation slaves (see, for example, John Garraty and Robert
McCaughey, The American Nation: A History of the United States to 1877,
Volume 1, New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1987, p. 385).

Most Northern states had "Black
Codes" that severely discriminated against free blacks. As mentioned, some
Northern states wouldn't even allow free blacks to move into their territory.
Let's briefly consider the conditions in one such Northern state, Illinois, the
"Land of Lincoln," a state that was described as a "free
state" because it had abolished slavery. As of 1845, free blacks could not
settle in Illinois unless they could prove their freedom and post a $1,000
bond. If a black did in fact have a certificate of freedom, under Illinois law
"he and his family were required to meet reporting and registration
procedures reminiscent of a totalitarian state," notes African-American
scholar Lerone Bennett (Forced Into Glory: Abraham Lincoln's White Dream,
Chicago: Johnson Publishing Company, 2000, pp. 184-185). Bennett continues
describing the conditions under which free blacks lived in Illinois,

The head of the
family had to register all family members and provide detailed descriptions to
the supervisor of the poor, who could expel the whole family at any moment.

Blacks who met
these requirements were under constant surveillance and could be disciplined or
arrested by any White. They could not vote, sue, or testify in court. . . .

With [Abraham]
Lincoln's active and passive support, the state used violence to keep Blacks
poor. Most trades and occupations were closed to them, and laws and customs
made it difficult for them to acquire real estate. . . .

As for the pursuit
of happiness . . . Blacks could not play percussion instruments, and any White
could apprehend any slave or servant for "riots, routs, unlawful
assemblies, trespasses and seditious speeches." It was a crime for any
person to permit "any slave or slaves, servant or servants or color, to
the number of three or more, to assemble in his, her or their house, out house,
yard or shed for the purpose of dancing or reveling, either by night or by day.
. . ." (Forced Into Glory, pp. 185-186)

Incidentally, Abraham Lincoln not only
supported the Illinois Black Code, but he voted to deny blacks the right to
vote and also voted "to tax Blacks to support White schools Black children
couldn't, in general, attend" (Forced Into Glory, p. 186).

In 1848 Illinois adopted a new constitution
that made it illegal for blacks to settle in the state. It, like the previous
statute, also prohibited them from voting and from serving in the militia. In
1853, the state legislature made it a crime, punishable by fine, for a black to
settle in the state. If the violator couldn't pay the fine, he or she could be
sold by the sheriff to pay court costs. The architect of this Negro Exclusion
Law was John Logan. During the Civil War, Lincoln named Logan to be a major
general in the federal army.

In any discussion on the South and the
Confederacy, critics invariably raise the issue of white supremacy. They are
quick to point out that Alexander Stephens, the vice president of the
Confederate States, said that one of the foundational principles of the new
government was that the white race was superior and that blacks were best
suited for slavery. Said Stephens,

Our new government
. . . rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man;
that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal
condition. (Cornerstone Speech, March 21, 1861)

When critics quote this statement, they
almost never inform the reader that, sad to say, most Americans at that time believed
that whites were superior and that blacks and other minorities were inferior.
One of those Americans was Lincoln himself, who said the following in 1858:

. . . anything
that argues me into . . . [the] idea of perfect social and political equality with
the negro is but a specious and fantastic arrangement of words, by which a man
can prove a horse chestnut to be a chestnut horse. . . . I have no purpose to
introduce political and social equality between the white and black races.
There is a physical difference between the two, which in my judgment will
probably forever forbid their living together upon the footing of perfect
equality, and inasmuch as it becomes a necessity that there must be a
difference, I, as well as Judge Douglas, am in favor of the race to which I
belong, having the superior position. (Abraham Lincoln: Speeches and
Writings 1832-1858, New York: The Library of America, 1989, edited by Don
Fehrenbacher, pp. 511-512)

In another speech that he gave that year,
Lincoln said much the same thing:

I will say, then,
that I am not nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way, the
social and political equality of the white and black races; that I am not nor
ever have been in favor of making voters of the free negroes, or jurors, or
qualifying them to hold office, or having them to marry white people. I will
say in addition, that there is a physical difference between the white and
black races, which, I suppose, will forever forbid the two races living
together upon terms of social and political equality, and inasmuch as they
cannot so live, that while they do remain together, there must be the position
of superior and inferior, that I as much as any other man am in favor of the
superior position being assigned to the white man. (Abraham Lincoln:
Speeches and Writings 1832-1858, p. 751)

Not only did most Americans believe that
blacks and other minorities were inferior, but they believed that America was
founded to be ruled by whites and for whites. Senator Stephen A. Douglas, a
prominent Northern politician, the leader of the Northern faction of the
Democratic Party, and a presidential candidate in 1860, voiced this view in the
following words in 1858 during his fourth debate with Lincoln:

I say to you in
all frankness, gentlemen, that in my opinion a negro is not a citizen, cannot
be, and ought not to be, under the constitution of the United States. . . . I
say that this government was established on the white basis. It was made by
white men, for the benefit of white men and their posterity forever, and never
should be administered by any except white men. (Fourth Lincoln-Douglas Debate:
Douglas' Reply, in Abraham Lincoln: Speeches and Writings 1832-1858, p.
673)

What did Lincoln think about this? He agreed,
saying, "in point of mere fact, I think so too" (The
Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, Volume 2, edited by Roy P. Basler,
Rutgers, 1955, p. 281, as quoted in Bennett, Forced Into Glory, p. 306,
emphasis added).

Many Northerners believed that the statement
in the Declaration of Independence that "all men are created equal"
did not apply to blacks, but only to whites. Senator Douglas expressed
this position in his fifth debate with Lincoln,

The signers of the
Declaration of Independence never dreamed of the negro when they were writing
that document. They referred to white men, to men of European birth and
European descent, when they declared the equality of all men. (Fifth
Lincoln-Douglas Debate: Douglas' Speech, in Abraham Lincoln: Speeches and
Writings 1832-1858, p. 697)

Lincoln believed that the "all men are
created equal" phrase did not refer to inherent equality but only
to legal equality in certain respects, and more than once Lincoln called the
Declaration of Independence "the white-man's charter of freedom" (Abraham
Lincoln: Speeches and Writings 1832-1858, pp. 269, 477; see also Bennett, Forced
Into Glory, pp. 303-304).

It's interesting to note that of the 3.4
million votes that were cast in the free states in the 1860 election,
Senator Douglas received over 800,000 of them.In addition, during that election Republican candidates described their
party as "the true 'White Man's Party' because they wanted to reserve the
territories for free white labor" (James McPherson, Ordeal By Fire: The
Civil War and Reconstruction, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982, p.
123).The Republican candidate for
governor in Ohio assured voters that “the Republican Party is the white man’s
party . . . and it labors for the prosperity and liberty of the white man” (Merton
L. Dillon, The Abolitionists: The Growth of a Dissenting Minority,
Norton Paperback Edition, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1979, p. 240).

James and Lois Horton point out that free
blacks in the North had fewer opportunities to engage in skilled labor than did
free blacks and slaves in the South:

Opportunities for
free black skilled workers seemed limited in the North in some ways that they
were not in the South.Slaves did
virtually all types of work, and . . . in the South . . . free blacks were
employed at many levels, even in skilled jobs.It was not unusual to find black carpenters, blacksmiths, and coopers
working in Charleston or New Orleans, for example.One observer noted that in New Orleans skilled work was performed
by some white workers but also by a substantial number of blacks, “and of the
negroes employed in those avocations a considerable proportion are free.”One black Virginian reported in the 1840s
that in Virginia “both bond (slaves) and free (blacks) had trades” and he “had
expected to find the people of color in free New York far better off than those
in Virginia.”Instead, he found that
“many tradesmen he knew from the South were . . . cooks and waiters.”Thus, northern blacks’ occupations reflected
both their job skills and the prejudice and discrimination which prevented many
from using those skills.

Official records
paint a dismal picture of black opportunities for skilled work in
Philadelphia.In 1859 they reported,
“Less than two-thirds of (black workers) who have trades follow them,” and “the
greater number are compelled to abandon their trades on account of the
unrelenting prejudice against their color.”The exclusion of black artisans was even worse in Boston, where one
foreign visitor reported seeing almost no skilled black workers in 1833.The few exceptions were “one or two employed
as printers, one blacksmith, and one shoemaker.”White workers in New York City pressured authorities to exclude
black workers from jobs requiring special authorization.The city regularly denied African Americans
licenses as hackmen or pushcart operators. . . .As a slave in Baltimore, Frederick Douglass was a skilled ship
caulker.After he escaped slavery and
moved to New Bedford, Massachusetts, he was unable to find employment as a
caulker because, as he was told, “every white man would leave the ship, in her
unfinished condition, if I struck a blow at my trade.”Douglass was forced to take unskilled work
at a fraction of the wages he would have made if he could have followed his
trade.

White workers in
the North generally saw black craftsmen as competitors and tried to exclude
them from the work force. . . .Blacks
were barred from membership in the trade associations, dominated by German and
some Irish immigrants, which pressured white businesses to hire black workers
only for “appropriate” menial employment. (In Hope of Liberty: Culture,
Community and Protest Among Northern Free Blacks, 1700-1860, New York:
Oxford University Press, 1998 paperback edition, pp. 117-118)

Merton Dillon observes that the abolition of
slavery in most of the North in the late eighteenth century actually caused an
increase in prejudice against free blacks:

The ending of
slavery in the North had not been accompanied by change in the racial attitudes
that for so long had supported it.If
anything, prejudice increased as the numbers of free Blacks grew and as the
insecurities resulting from rapid economic and social change were felt
throughout white society.Prejudice was
not expressed in verbal slurs and social slights alone.Far more serious was the fact that custom
barred most Blacks from economic and educational opportunity.Although striking examples can be cited of
Blacks who overcame all such obstacles, the majority were shut out by prejudice
from sharing in the profits and advantages of the growing American economy. (The
Abolitionists, pp. 20-21)

Even after the war, racism was alive and
well in the North. Herbert Gutman notes that Northern whites not only viewed
blacks as inferior but also women and working-class men:

Northern whites
regularly compared the ex-slaves to the northern Irish and other "degraded
. . . races or classes." (The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom,
New York: Pantheon Books, 1976, p. 293)

Several years after the war, prominent
Northern leader William Seward, who had served as Lincoln’s Secretary of State,
said the following:

The North has nothing to do with the
Negroes.I have no more concern for
them than I have for the Hottentots. . . .They are not of our race.”(William Klingaman, Abraham Lincoln and the Road to Emancipation,
New York: Viking Press, 2001 p. 295)

I could go on for several pages
documenting the fact that, unfortunately, throughout the nineteenth century
most Americans, North and South, believed in white supremacy. This is why it's
unfair when critics quote Stephens' cornerstone speech but remain silent about
the fact that most Northerners held very similar views, and that some
Northerners held identical views. It's also unfair when critics quote Stephens'
speech but say nothing about the Black Codes that existed in most Northern
states. Furthermore, not all Southerners agreed with Stephens' belief that
blacks were best suited for slavery, but critics rarely mention this fact
either.

What Was Slavery Really Like?

So just how bad was slavery in the South?
Did any good come from slavery? Did slavery have any good aspects? Did all
slaveowners mistreat their slaves? The subject of slavery in the antebellum
(i.e., pre-Civil War) South is a delicate, highly charged issue because history
books and documentaries have usually only told one side of the story.The recent PBS documentary Slavery and
the Making of America is a prime example of theone-sided, misleading, and incomplete portrayals of Southern
slavery that are usually presented to the public. I'm not trying to justify
slavery. All I'm saying is that if we're going to talk about slavery, let's be
fair and honest about it.

Most history books and documentaries that
discuss slavery are full of tragic stories about the bad aspects of slavery,
but they rarely mention the good aspects of the institution. Historians
typically cite the worst cases of mistreatment and abuse but ignore or minimize
the far more numerous cases of humane treatment, mutual respect, and genuine
friendship. True, the good aspects of slavery don't outweigh the fact that
slavery was wrong, but they should be noted in the interest of fairness and
historical truth.

Southern slavery may have been the most
humane form of slavery the world had ever known.Most slaves were not mistreated, and most masters treated their
slaves humanely.Slaves in the South
were arguably materially better off than many factory workers in the North. In
many cases, slaves and slaveholders formed lasting friendships.Most of the ex-slaves who were interviewed
for the W.P.A. narratives and who discussed how they were treated said their
masters were good men.Some slaves
remained fiercely loyal to their masters, even during the war and even though
they had ample opportunity to leave. The suicide rate among slaves was actually
substantially lower than the suicide rate among whites.In part because of the efforts of numerous
slaveowners, millions of slaves voluntarily accepted Christianity and found
peace in their personal lives.In some
cases, Christian slaves converted their masters and afterward enjoyed a better
relationship with them (see, for example, Leslie Howard Owens, This Species
of Property: Slave Life and Culture in the Old South, New York: Oxford
University Press, 1976, p. 150).Bearing in mind that most American slaves lived in the South, let's consider
some of the observations of historian James McPherson, who certainly can't be
accused of being sympathetic toward the antebellum South:

Slavery in the
United States operated with less physical harshness than in most other parts of
the Western Hemisphere. . . .

The U.S. slave
population increased by an average of 27 percent per decade after 1810, almost
the same natural growth rate as for the white population. This rate of increase
was unique in the history of bondage. No other slave population in the Western
Hemisphere even maintained, much less increased, its population through natural
reproduction. In Barbados, for example, the decennial natural decrease from
1712 to 1762 was 43 percent. At the time of emancipation, the black population
of the United States was ten times the number of Africans who had been
imported, but the black population of the West Indies was only half the number
of Africans who had been imported. Of the ten million Africans brought across
the Atlantic by the slave trade, the United States received fewer than 6
percent; yet at the time of emancipation it had more than 30 percent of the
hemisphere's black population. (Ordeal By Fire, pp. 34-35)

McPherson notes other interesting facts:
Although Southern law did not recognize marriages between slaves, 66 to 80
percent of slave marriages were not broken up by their masters (Ordeal By
Fire, pp. 35-36).McPherson points
out that not only did most slaveowners permit their slaves to marry, but that
some masters allowed their slaves to earn money and in some cases to buy their
freedom (Ordeal By Fire, p. 34).Economic historians Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman contend that
slaves were able to earn money and rise to responsible positions in the slave
system, and that in some cases they received a greater share of the product of
their labor than did many factory workers in the North (Time on the Cross,
Norton Edition with Afterword, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1989, pp.
39-78, 144-150; see also John Niven, The Coming of the Civil War,
Arlington Heights, Illinois: Harlan Davidson, Inc., 1990, pp. 160-161).Fogel and Engerman discuss some of the
various forms of advancement and reward that existed in Southern slavery:

While slavery
clearly limited the opportunities of bondsmen [slaves] to acquire skills, the
fact remains that over 25 percent of males were managers, professionals,
craftsmen, and semiskilled workers.Thus, the common belief that all slaves were menial laborers is false.Rather than being one undifferentiated mass,
slave society produced a complex social hierarchy which was closely related to
the occupational pyramid. . . .

Neglect of the
fact that more than one out of every five adult male slaves held preferred
occupational positions, which involved not only more interesting and less
arduous labor but also yielded substantially higher real incomes, has
encouraged still another oversight: that is, the failure to recognize the
existence of a flexible and exceedingly effective incentive system that
operated within the framework of slavery. . . .

What planters
wanted was not sullen and discontented slaves who did just enough to keep from
getting whipped.They wanted devoted,
hard-working, responsible slaves who identified their fortunes with the
fortunes of their masters.Planters
sought to imbue slaves with a “Protestant” work ethic and to transform that
ethic from a state of mind into a high level of production.“My negroes have their name up in the
neighborhood,” wrote Bennett Barrow, “for making more than anyone else and they
think whatever they do is better than anybody else.”Such an attitude could not be beaten into slaves.It had to be elicited.

Much of the
managerial attention of planters was focused on the problem of motivating their
hands.To achieve the desired response
they developed a wide-ranging system of rewards.Some rewards were directed toward improving short-run
performance.Included in this category
were prizes for the individual or the gang [a team of slaves] with the best
picking record on a given day or during a given week.The prizes were such items as clothing, tobacco, and whiskey;
sometimes the prize was cash.Good
immediate performance was also rewarded with unscheduled holidays or with trips
to town on weekends.When slaves worked
at times normally set aside for rest, they received extra pay—usually in cash
and at the rate prevailing in the region for hired labor.Slaves who were performing well were
permitted to work on their own account after normal hours at such tasks as
making shingles or weaving baskets, articles which they could sell either to
their masters or to farmers in the neighborhood.

Some rewards were
directed at influencing behavior over periods of intermediate duration.The rewards in this category were usually
paid at the end of the year.Year-end
bonuses, given either in goods or in cash, were frequently quite
substantial.Bennett Barrow, for
example, distributed gifts averaging between $15 and $20 per slave family in
both 1839 and 1840.The amounts
received by particular slaves were proportionalto their performance.It
should be noted that $20 was about a fifth of national per capita income in
1840.A bonus of the same relative
magnitude today would be in the neighborhood of $1,000.

Masters also
rewarded slaves who performed well with patches of land ranging up to a few
acres for each family.Slaves grew
marketable crops on these lands, the proceeds of which accrued to them.On the Texas plantation of Julian S.
Devereux, slaves operating such land produced as much as two bales of cotton
per patch.Devereux marketed their crop
along with his own.In a good year some
of the slaves earned in excess of $100 per annum [per year] for their families.Devereux set up accounts to which he
credited the proceeds of the sales.Slaves drew on these accounts when they wanted cash or when they wanted
Devereux to purchase clothing, pots, pans, tobacco, or similar goods for them.

Occasionally
planters even devised elaborate schemes for profit sharing with their
slaves.William Jemison, an Alabama
planter, entered into the following agreement with his bondsmen:“You shall have two thirds of the corn and
cotton made on the plantation and as much of the wheat as will reward you for
the sowing it.I also furnish you with
provisions for this year. . . .”

There was a third
category of rewards.These were of a
long-term nature, often requiring the lapse of a decade or more before they
paid off.Thus, slaves had the
opportunity to rise within the social and economic hierarchy that existed under
bondage.Field hands could become
artisans or drivers.Artisans could be
allowed to move from the plantation to town where they would hire themselves
out.Drivers could move up to the
position of head driver or overseer.Climbing the economic ladder brought not only social status, and
sometimes more freedom; it also had significant payoffs in better housing,
better clothing, and cash bonuses. (Time on the Cross, pp. 40-41,
147-149)

In a separate study, Fogel observes the
following:

U.S. masters also
designed a wide array of positive incentives to promote the productivity of
slaves. . . .A favorite device was the
awarding of prizes to the individual or the gang with the best cotton-picking
record on a given day or during a given week.Year-end bonuses, often distributed at Christmas, were another common
device and could be quite substantial.One Louisiana planter, for example, distributed gifts averaging between
$15 and $20 per slave family in 1839 and 1840, with the amount of the gift made
proportional to the planter’s view of the performance of each of his
slaves.Not all gifts were this large
($20 in 1840 was about one-fifth of per capita income; a bonus of the same
magnitude today would be about $1,000), but $20 was by no means an upper bound.

Indeed, many
large-scale planters had elaborate systems for rewarding exceptional work that
not only recognized outstanding performances by field hands but generally led
to substantial income differentials between ordinary field hands on the one hand
and exceptional workers, especially drivers or artisans, on the other. (Without
Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery, New York: W. W.
Norton & Company, 1994, p. 191)

Fogel further notes that slaveholders often
allowed slaves to grow food for their own use and to sell some of that food for
their own profit:

Most U.S. planters
allowed slaves to supplement rations with vegetables raised in gardens or by
rearing small livestock and often purchased eggs, chickens, and vegetables
raised by slaves for use on their own tables [i.e., on the slaves’
tables].There were also masters who
rewarded top hands by allowing them plots of up to a few acres to grow cotton
or other staples on their own time, with the proceeds of the sales of these
crops accruing to the hands. . . .

A recent study by
Phillip D. Morgan of the practices of planters in the low country of South
Carolina, where the task system predominated, revealed that despite legal
injunctions prohibiting slaves from producing and marketing on their own
account, the practice was widespread.An industrious slave could sometimes finish his daily task by 2
P.M.Such slaves accumulated property
at a high rate.Morgan estimates that
in one county the average recorded accumulation of mature males was over $300,
which is similar to the estimates of the wealth of industrious slaves in
Jamaica. (Without Consent or Contract, pp. 192-193)

Slaves in Southern cities had additional
opportunities to advance themselves. This was no small number of people either.
In 1860 there were some 400,000 slaves living in cities, "and many
additional thousands were hired out by their owners" (J. G. Randall and
David Donald, The Civil War and Reconstruction, Lexington, Massachusetts:
D. C. Heath and Company, 1969, p. 75). J. G. Randall and David Donald, citing
the research of Richard B. Morris, point out some of the opportunities that
were available to these slaves:

By the nature of
their employments and the conditions of their service, as Richard B. Morris has
pointed out, these urban and industrial slaves were a step removed from
plantation service. . . . many of them were, despite numerous legal
restrictions, "permitted to hold property, receive wages, make contracts, and
assume supervisory responsibilities"; in addition, they possessed
"some measure of mobility and occasionally a limited choice as to masters
and occupations." "In industry slaves were customarily reimbursed for
services performed beyond an accepted minimum," Professor Morris
continues. ". . . slaves hired to others occasionally received directly a
portion of the hiring wages. . . . Masters were often reluctant to force slaves
to work as hirelings in occupations they disliked or for masters whom they found
uncongenial." An increasing number of slaves were permitted to hire their
own time--i.e., to work at whatever employment they pleased, paying their
masters an annual rental. Such "nominal slaves" were able "to
control their earnings, separate property, or occupational choices." (The
Civil War and Reconstruction, p. 76)

Most slaves were provided with good housing
for that era.The Northern
abolitionists’ claim that slaves lived in inhumane housing was unfounded.The “houses of slaves compared well with the
housing of free workers in the antebellum era” (Fogel and Engerman, Time on
the Cross, p. 116).Some slaves who
worked in Southern cities had private homes "that rivaled those of country
slaveholders in space and rustic luxury" (Owens, This Species of Property,
p. 147). On "many of the farms the slave cabins were not much inferior to
the master's cabin," and on some plantations "they were nearly as
comfortable as the overseer's cottage" (Kenneth Stampp, The Peculiar
Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South, Vintage Books Edition, New
York: Vintage Books, 1989, p. 293).According to information from the 1860 census, there were 5.2 slaves per
house on large plantations, whereas there were 5.3 persons per house in free
households, and most slave families, like most free families, lived in a house
by themselves and didn’t have to share the house with others (Fogel and
Engerman, Time on the Cross, pp. 115-116).In fact, Fogel and Engerman point out that the typical slave
cabin probably provided more sleeping space per person than did the homes of
most workers in New York City over twenty years after the war:

As late as 1893, a
survey of the housing of workers in New York City revealed that the median
number of square feet of sleeping space per person was just thirty-five.In other words, the “typical” slave cabin of
the late antebellum era probably contained more sleeping space per person than
was available to most of New York City’s workers half a century later. (Time
on the Cross, p. 116)

Good relations often existed between slaves
and slaveowners. As one example of this fact, let's consider the relationship
between Confederate soldier Henry Kyd Douglas and one of his family's slaves
named Enoch, who had left the family and had gone to live in Pennsylvania as a
free man. When Enoch found out that Douglas had been wounded and captured and
that he was being held in a Union prison camp, he wrote to Douglas and offered
to send him money. Douglas was deeply moved by the offer:

I was surprised
about this time to receive a letter from Enoch, whom I have spoken of as my
father's colored coachman. He had gone off from home and was living in
Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, working for his living, in freedom, but harder than
he ever did in his life. He wrote to say that he heard I was wounded and in
prison and was having a hard time, and he had laid aside several hundred
dollars and would send it to me, or as much as I wanted, if I were suffering or
needed it. His letter was in his own untutored language, but its words were
verily apples of gold. I did not need his money, but I hope I wrote him a
letter that left no doubt of my appreciation and my gratitude. (Henry Kyd
Douglas, I Rode With Stonewall, Marietta, Georgia: Mockingbird Books,
1974, reprint, p. 255)

Another case in point is that of Jefferson
Davis, the president of the Confederate States of America himself. Davis cared
deeply for his slaves, and they for him. When Davis had to leave his plantation
suddenly in order to assume duties as the Confederate president, "He made
a touching farewell speech to his quickly assembled slaves, who responded with
expressions of devotion. . . ." (Rembert Patrick, Jefferson Davis and
His Cabinet, Louisiana State University Press, 1944, p. 27). Davis was
deeply concerned about the fate of his slaves when federal forces torched and
plundered the Davis estates in Mississippi. Davis even sent money, in fact
$3,000, to pay for supplies for his slaves to ensure they received proper care.
The year before Davis died, he received a letter from one of his former slaves,
James H. Jones, who had since become a Republican and had had a successful
career in the intervening fifteen years. Jones told Davis, "I have always
been as warmly attached to you as when I was your body servant" (William
J. Cooper, Jefferson Davis, American, Vintage Books Edition, New York:
Vintage Books, 2000, p. 691). Jones went on to say that he always defended
Davis from "any attack of malicious or envious people" (Cooper, Jefferson
Davis, American, p. 691). William J. Cooper gives us additional information
about Davis's relations with blacks:

Without question
he respected individual blacks and in turn received their respect. His dealings
with his slave James Pemberton and with Ben Montgomery as both a slave and a
freedman illustrate such a relationship. Inviting Davis to attend the Colored
State Fair in Vicksburg in 1886, Montgomery's son Isaiah said he knew Davis
would have an interest "in any Enterprise tending to the welfare and
development of the Colored people of Mississippi." "We would be
highly pleased to have you here," Isaiah Montgomery asserted, " and
he closed "with best wishes for your continued preservation." (Jefferson
Davis, American, pp. 690-691)

At a time when many Americans, in all parts
of the country, still opposed allowing blacks to testify in court, Davis
favored allowing them to do so. He expressed this view in a letter to his wife
in which he also expressed concern about the welfare of their former slaves:

I hope the
negroes' fidelity will be duly rewarded and regret that we are not in a
position to aid and protect them. There is, I observe, a controversy which I
regret as to allowing negroes to testify in court. From brother Joe [Joseph
Davis], many years ago, I derived the opinion that they should be made
competent witnesses, the jury judging of their credibility. (Jefferson
Davis: Private Letters 1823-1889, selected and edited by Hudson Strode, New
York: De Capo Press, 1995, reprint, p. 188)

Few people know that Davis and his wife informally
adopted a mulatto (part-white-part-black) orphan during the war. For those who
care to know, the child looked like a young African-American boy, except that
his skin was slightly less dark than the skin of most other black children; his
facial features and hair were clearly African-American. Mrs. Davis rescued the
young boy from a cruel guardian and brought him with her to live at the
Confederate White House in Richmond. His name was Jim Limber. Davis and his
wife raised him as one of their own children. Jim Limber and the other Davis
children played together as normal siblings. Even in family letters, Jim's new
family spoke lovingly of him, and he expressed his love for them. Sadly, after
the war, the Davises had to give up custody of the child when a disreputable
Union officer threatened to take him from them (Felicity Allen, Jefferson
Davis: Unconquerable Heart, Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri
Press, 1999, p. 24).

Davis was a kind, decent Christian man who
treated blacks with respect, and many blacks knew it. During a trip through the
western part of the Confederacy, Davis got off his train at Griswoldville,
Georgia, in order to meet with a group of slaves who had gathered in the hope
of seeing him. These men worked at a local pistol factory and had come to the
train station because they wanted to meet Davis. Informed of the gathering,
Davis got off the train and circulated among the group, shaking each hand and
speaking to each man individually (Cooper, Jefferson Davis, American, p.
494). When Davis returned to Richmond, Virginia, after the war, he was not only
cheered by whites but also by blacks. One observer noted that Davis was
"greatly touched" by the sympathy shown to him by the blacks in the
crowd. In fact, some blacks climbed up on his carriage, shook and kissed his
hand, and called out "God bless Mars Davis" (Allen, Jefferson
Davis: Unconquerable Heart, pp. 486-487).

Many other examples of good relations
between slaves and slaveholders could be cited. For example, there were numerous
instances during the war when slaves hid food from Union troops and then gave
the food to their masters and their families (who in turn shared it with them).
One such instance occurred when Union forces occupied Charles and Mary Jones'
plantation on the Georgia coast. When the Union troops took over the
plantation, a slave named Sue hid potatoes from the troops in order to feed the
Jones' children (Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, p.
322).

Ex-slaves of the Sea Islands in South
Carolina showed great kindness to their former masters when the masters fell on
hard times. The freedmen "did not enjoy seeing their old masters
suffer." They "offered help and even, when they could, gave them
money" (in Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, p. 312
n). An ex-slave in Georgia remained on his former master's estate to work for
wages "so that, in a variety of ways, he could take care of the distressed
white family. . . ." (in Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and
Freedom, p. 312 n). In another case, Clarence Fripp, a former Sea Islands
slaveowner whose plantation had been sold from him, went back to his old
plantation and asked his ex-slaves for money because he was nearly destitute.
The former slaves took up a collection for Fripp and gave him a
"significant amount of money" (in Gutman, The Black Family in
Slavery and Freedom, p. 312 n). Two years earlier, "a northerner among
the Sea Islanders reported that 'all' the ex-slaves 'speak with great affection
of Fripp'" (in Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, p.
312 n).

"Many ex-slaves," notes Leslie
Howard Owens, "chose to live with their masters after emancipation, some
out of affection" (This Species of Property, p. 86). Owens
continues,

The affection that
masters and domestics [domestic slaves] showed one another took many forms. At
the death of Jimmy, a "faithful servant," one of her owners, whom she
had suckled in his infancy, experienced her loss deeply. He lamented that she
"always felt more like a mother than a servant to me and was a kind mother
to all my children." Masters' feelings at these times seem to strip the
slave's personality of any resemblance to stereotypes. Jimmy's master continued
his tribute as follows: she "was a kind mother to all my children. I frequently
left them entirely in her care and always found her faithful in nursing and
taking care of them and they all loved her as a mother and she loved them. . .
." In other cases, masters compared their domestics to relatives and
friends: [In speaking to his sister during a funeral, one master said]
"True, sister, he was a servant, and you may be vexed or ashamed, that I
should in any manner compare him with yourself . . . but although his skin was
black his heart was always in the right place." (This Species of Property,
pp. 116-117)

Some female slaves occupied an especially
honored place in plantation homes. Owens observes that one of "the most
privileged domestics was the black mammy of the large estate" (This
Species of Property, p. 118). Owens provides further information on these
women:

She "is in
fact the foster Mother of her Master's children and is treated with all the
respect due to the faithful discharge of the duties of her station. . . ."
The mammy nursed them through their illnesses and watched them as they grew
into adulthood. She also showered them with a loving affection, which they
returned. Many whites mourned for her at her death. (This Species of
Property, p. 118)

One almost never hears about the fact that
at times free blacks sought refuge on slaveholders' plantations to escape
persecution during periods of rumored slave revolts. Says Owens,

There were times,
too, when slaves witnessed the hasty retreat of free blacks to the plantation's
safety in order to escape repression by whites during periods of rumored slave
uprisings. Elizabeth Jefferson of Mississippi remarked that her "grand
father let a negro free and gave him a trade. He was a competent brickmason.
Often he came to the plantation for protection, sometimes remaining there for
weeks." And this was not all. "There was an old . . . [slave] freed
by a relative of our family. He was prosperous and finally bought his wife and
children. He and his family on several occasions came to Greenwood for
protection." This was not an atypical situation. (This Species
of Property, pp. 86-87, emphasis added)

Most masters strove to accommodate a slave
couple's desire to get married, and some sought to provide a form of
recognition for the marriage. Cooper says "most slaveowners . . .
recognized families among their slaves, despite the absence of any statutory
provision or protection for the slave family" (Jefferson Davis,
American, p. 251).As a matter of
fact, Fogel and Engerman observe that slave marriages “were not only recognized
but actively promoted under plantation codes” (Fogel and Engerman, Time on
the Cross, p. 128).This promotion,
say Fogel and Engerman, came in various forms:

To promote the
stability of slave families, planters often combined exhortations with a system
of rewards and sanctions.The rewards
included such subsidies as separate houses for married couples, gifts of
household goods, and cash bonuses.They
often sought to make the marriage a solemn event by embedding it in a
well-defined ritual.Some marriage
ceremonies were performed in churches, others by the planter in the “big
house.”In either case, marriages were
often accompanied by feasts and sometimes made the occasion for a general
holiday. . . .

For most slaves it
was the law of the plantation, not of the state, that was relevant.Only a small proportion of the slaves ever
had to deal with the law enforcement mechanism of the state.Their daily lives were governed by
plantation law.Consequently, the
emphasis put on the sanctity of the slave family by many planters, and the
legal status given to the slave family under plantation law, cannot be lightly
dismissed. (Time on the Cross, pp. 128-129)

Gutman observes,

The recollections
of elderly ex-slaves and other historical evidence disclose a variety of ways
in which slave marriages were publicly announced and legitimized. . . . Elderly
ex-slaves also recollected owner-sponsored ceremonies. (The Black Family in
Slavery and Freedom, pp. 273-274)

John Blassingame points out that thousands
of slaves were married in Southern churches:

Abolition doubts
notwithstanding, thousands of slaves were married in Southern churches between
1800 and 1860. For example, out of a total of 1,228 marriages performed in
Episcopal churches in South Carolina, Alabama, North Carolina, Georgia, Louisiana,
Mississippi, and Virginia in 1860, at least 460, or 38.1 percent, were slave
weddings. At many times between 1830 and 1860 more slaves were married in the
Episcopal churches in some states than were whites. Between 1841 and 1860
Episcopal ministers performed 3,225 weddings in South Carolina; 1,705, or 52
percent, of these were slave marriages. (The Slave Community: Plantation
Life in the Antebellum South, Revised and Enlarged Edition, New York:
Oxford University Press, 1979, p. 169)

Contrary to the portrayals often given in
textbooks and documentaries, most slave marriages and slave families were not
broken up by their masters."A
study of wills and advertisements," says Francis Butler Simkins, "shows
that many masters" stipulated that their slaves "were not to be sold
away from their families or transported out of the state" (A History of
the South, Third Edition, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Publisher, 1963, p.
123). As mentioned, even a strongly pro-Northern historian like McPherson
acknowledges that 66 to 80 percent of slave marriages were not broken up by
their masters.Fogel and Engerman note
that information from the slave market in New Orleans, which was the largest of
the markets, refutes the claim that masters frequently broke up slave marriages
and slave families:

Data contained in
the sales records in New Orleans, by far the largest market in the
interregional slave trade, sharply contradict the popular view that the
destruction of slave marriages was at least a frequent, if not a universal,
consequence of the slave trade.These
records, which cover thousands of transactions during the years from 1804 to
1862, indicate that more than 84 percent of all sales over the age of fourteen
involved unmarried individuals.Of
those who were or had been married, 6 percent were sold with their mates; and
probably at least one quarter of the remainder were widowed or voluntarily
separated.Hence, it is likely that 13
percent, or less, of interregional sales resulted in the destruction of
marriages. . . .the New Orleans data
show that slaveowners were averse to breaking up black families. . . . (Time
on the Cross, pp. 49, 52)

When circumstances led to the separation of
a slave family, some owners and others tried to help the family in any way they
could. Notes Gutman,

The separation of
slave family members by sale or for other reasons led some sensitive owners to
encourage contact between them. . . .

Overt expressions
of slave familial feelings deeply affected some owners and other whites who
came into contact with these slaves. Whites intervened sometimes to prevent the
sale of slaves. After a hired Virginia slave was sold and separated from his
family because he had not earned enough, whites who attended church with the
man raised sufficient cash to buy him from a trader. Their slave grandmother
persuaded a Kentucky clergyman to bid for two teen-aged sisters threatened with
a distant sale, but a trader outbid him. The purchase of Mima and her children
by an Alexandria slave-trading firm led the hard-pressed Virginian Richard H.
Carter, who owned Mima's husband, to try to buy them "because of the
distress . . . on account of the separation". . . . (The Black Family
in Slavery and Freedom, pp. 287-288)

Kenneth Stampp:

No slaveholder
needed to respect the marital ties of his slaves; yet a Tennesseean purchased
several slaves at a public sale, not because he needed them, but because of
"their intermarriage with my servants and their appeals to me to do
so." A Kentucky mistress tried to buy the wife of her slave before moving
to Missouri. Another Kentuckian, when obliged to sell his slaves, gave each an
opportunity to find a satisfactory purchaser and refused to sell any to persons
residing outside the neighborhood. (The Peculiar Institution, pp.
229-230)

A number of slaves were freed by their
owners in the owners' wills. African-American scholars John Franklin and Alfred
Moss note that for many years slaveholders, "stricken by conscience,
impelled by affection, or yielding to the temptation to evade responsibility,
manumitted [freed] their slaves in large numbers. . . ." (From
Slavery to Freedom, Eighth Edition, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000, p.
168, emphasis added).

Other slaves earned enough money to purchase
their freedom. Some owners assisted with the purchase of freedom by accepting
payments over a period of time or by agreeing to accept a generously low price.
Stampp explains how some slaves managed to buy their freedom:

Occasionally, they
earned the necessary funds by working nights and Sundays. More often, they
hired their own time. Either way, they gradually accumulated enough money to
pay their masters an amount equal to their value and thus obtained deeds of
emancipation. Benevolent masters helped ambitious bondsmen by permitting them
to make the payments in installments over a period of years or by accepting a
sum lower than the market price. (The Peculiar Institution, p. 96)

Allan Nevins noted that even in the 1850s
"many" slaves continued to buy their freedom:

Even in the eighteen-fifties,
many slaves, particularly in towns and among the skilled or semi-skilled,
continued to buy their liberty. (The Emergence of Lincoln, Volume 2, New
York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1950, p. 161)

In contrast to many factory workers in the
North, and even in contrast to many low-wage workers in our day, many if not
most slaves received relatively good medical care. Most slaves received at
least some medical care. And some slaves received exceptional medical care.
Says Stampp,

To treat their sick
slaves, many masters employed trained physicians, often the same ones who
treated the white families. A few large planters retained resident doctors on
their estates; occasionally several small planters together contracted with a
doctor for his full-time service. More commonly a slaveholder made a yearly
contract with a physician who agreed to charge a fixed amount for each visit.
"Bargained today with Dr. Trotti to practice at the plantation,"
Hammond noted in his diary. "He agrees to charge only $2.50 a visit
without reference to the number of sick prescribed for." Another planter
cautioned his overseer, "Strong medicines should be left to the Doctor;
and since the Proprietor [the master] never grudges a Doctor's bill, however
large, he has a right to expect that the Overseer shall always send for a
Doctor when a serious case occurs." Slaveholders, both large and small,
sometimes spent generous sums for skilled medical treatment for their
"people." To prove that there was "no class of working people in
the world better cared for," one southern physician declared that he had
often received large fees for attending even senile and worthless slaves.

This statement was
much too optimistic, but it did give recognition to a class of humane masters
whose expenditures for medical service went far beyond the simple dictates of
self-interest. In mourning the death of an old slave woman, a North Carolinian
noted that his physician had given the case "assiduous attention" for
six months, "devoting to it more reflection and research than he had (as
he informs me) to any case within ten years". . . .

A few masters
patronized hospitals which were built and maintained especially for the care of
sick slaves. During the 1850's, three Savannah physicians ran a slave hospital
for "lying-in" women as well as for medical and surgical cases;
similar institutions existed in Charleston, Montgomery, Natchez, and New
Orleans. But plantation proprietors usually established their own hospitals
where the sick could be attended by physicians or slave nurses. "All sick
persons are to stay in the hospital night and day, from the time they first
complain to the time they are able to go to work again," a South
Carolinian instructed his overseer. "Hopeton," James Hamilton Couper's
Georgia rice plantation, contained a model hospital where ailing slaves
received the best medical attention the South could provide. The hospital was
well ventilated and steam heated; it contained an examining room, medicine
closet, kitchen, bathing room, and four wards, all of which were swept every
day and scrubbed once a week.

Wise and humane
masters gave proper attention to slave women who were either expectant or
nursing mothers. A Mississippian ordered his overseer to treat them with
"great tenderness." A South Carolinian required "lying-in
women" to remain at the quarters for four weeks after parturition, because
their health might be "entirely ruined by want of care in this
particular." Hammond gave the "sucklers" lighter tasks near the
quarters and insisted that they be cool and rested before morning.

Some masters were
equally solicitous about the care of slave children. On the smaller
establishments they appointed an old woman to watch the children while the
mothers worked in the fields. On the plantations they built nurseries where the
plantation nurse cooked for the children, mended their clothing, and looked
after them during illness. (The Peculiar Institution, pp. 311-313)

Fogel and Engerman:

While the quality
of slave medical care was poor by modern standards, there is no evidence of
exploitation in the medical care typically provided for plantation slaves. . .
.

That adequate
maintenance of the health of their slaves was a central objective of most
planters is repeatedly emphasized in instructions to overseers and in other
records and correspondence of planters. . . .

Slave health care
was at its best for pregnant women.“Pregnant women,” wrote one planter, “must be treated with great
tenderness, worked near home and lightly.”“Light work” was generally interpreted as 50 to 60 percent of normal
effort and was to exclude activity which required heavy physical effort.During the last month of pregnancy work was
further reduced. . . .

Demographic
evidence gives strong support to descriptions of pre- and post-natal care
contained in plantation rules, letters, and diaries.Computations based on data from the 1850 census indicate that the
average death rate due to pregnancy among slave women in the prime childbearing
ages, twenty to twenty-nine, was just one per thousand. . . .The slave mortality rate in childbearing was
not only low on an absolute scale, it was also lower than the maternal death
rate experienced by southern white women. (Time on the Cross, pp. 117,
122-123)

In addition, slaves were by no means always
confined to their farms and plantations. Many if not most slaves were allowed
to visit other estates or to go into nearby towns on a fairly regular basis. A
few slaves lived in a state of virtual freedom. As mentioned, some slaves
earned money by working on their time off. Slaves were usually free to attend
church, and often times they were encouraged to do so. Blassingame observes
that many slaves did not have to sneak off the plantation in order to leave for
short periods for social visits and the like:

Many slaves did
not have to use . . . stratagems. Their masters did not try to restrict their
recreational activities as long as they did not interfere with the plantation
routine. According to Robert Anderson, "The slaves on a plantation could
get together almost any time they felt like it, for little social affairs, so
long as it did not interfere with the work on the plantation. During the slack
times the people from one plantation could visit one another, by getting
permission and sometimes they would slip away and make visits anyway."
Similarly, Elijah Marrs said his master "allowed us generally to do as we
pleased after his own work was done, and we enjoyed the privilege granted to
us." (The Slave Community, p. 108)

The more religious planters not only excused
their slaves from work on religious holidays but provided great feasts and
recreation on these occasions. "During these periods, which lasted from
four to six days," says Blassingame, "planters prepared sumptuous
feasts for their slaves" (The Slave Community, p. 107). He
continues,

Whole hogs, sheep,
or beeves were cooked and the slaves ate peach cobbler and apple dumplings, and
frequently got drunk. Often the festival seasons included dances and athletic
contests. (The Slave Community, p. 107)

Abolitionists claimed that most slaves
worked intolerably long hours.This
claim is repeated in the PBS documentary Slavery and the Making of America.In point of fact, “the slave work year was shorter
than the free work year” (Fogel, Without Consent or Contract, p. 78,
original emphasis).Fogel qualifies
this observation by making the argument that slaves were forced to work harder
than were free workers; yet, he admits that slaves also earned 15 percent more income
per clock-time hour than free workers earned (Without Consent or Contract,
p. 79).In addition, Fogel concedes
that on average slaves enjoyed longer rest breaks during the workday and more
time off on Sundays than did free workers (Without Consent or Contract,
p. 79).As a matter of fact, many if
not most masters gave their slaves part of Saturday off and all of Sunday off (Without
Consent or Contract, pp. 77-78).Not only did slaves work less hours than did free workers, but they also
worked less hours than did workers in English textile mills:

Recent studies on
the labor routine on U.S. cotton plantations have revealed that the average
work week during the spring, summer, and fall was about 58 hours, well below
the 72 hours thought to have prevailed in English textile mills during the
first quarter of the nineteenth century and also below the 60-hour work week of
northern commercial farmers in the United States during the first quarter of
the twentieth century. (Fogel, Without Consent or Contract, pp. 28-29)

One frequently runs across the claim that
slaves had no legal protection. This is simply not true. I'm not saying slaves
had all the legal protection they deserved, but the often-heard claim that they
had no protection whatsoever is incorrect. Stampp discusses the legal status of
slaves:

"A
slave," said a Tennessee judge, "is not in the condition of a horse.
. . . He has mental capacities, and an immortal principle in his nature."
The laws did not "extinguish his high-born nature nor deprive him of many
rights which are inherent in man." All the southern codes recognized the
slave as a person for purposes other than holding him accountable for crimes.
Many state constitutions required the legislature "to pass such laws as
may be necessary to oblige the owners of slaves to treat them with humanity; to
provide for them necessary clothing and provisions; to abstain from all
injuries to them, extending to life and limb."

The legislatures
responded with laws extending some protection to the persons of slaves. Masters
who refused to feed and clothe slaves properly might be fined; in several
states the court might order them to be sold, the proceeds going to the
dispossessed owners. Those who abandoned or neglected insane, aged, or infirm
slaves were also liable to fines. In Virginia the overseers of the poor were
required to care for such slaves and to charge their masters. (The Peculiar
Institution, p. 217)

All Southern states had laws that imposed
penalties for mistreating slaves. Whites who killed slaves could be convicted
of first- or second-degree murder or of manslaughter, depending on the
circumstances, and could be put to death for the crime. A few whites were
actually executed for murdering slaves, and in a few other cases, Southern
courts refused to convict slaves who had killed brutal overseers because they
had acted in self-defense to resist a potentially deadly assault (Stampp, The
Peculiar Institution, pp. 220-221).

Southern legislatures sought to provide
other legal protections for slaves. Some legislatures passed laws that limited
the number of hours a slave could be worked in a day. All legislatures enacted
laws that set aside Sunday as a day of rest for slaves. Some states provided
for trials by black juries for slaves accused of misdemeanor offenses. In most
states, slaves who were accused of a capital crime were given jury trials in
the regular courts. Certain states, like Texas, stipulated that slaves accused
of any felony were to receive an impartial trial by jury.

Northern abolitionists charged that most
slaves were poorly fed.The evidence
indicates otherwise.Indeed, the energy
value of the average daily diet of slaves “exceeded that of free men in 1879 by
more than 10 percent” (Fogel and Engerman, Time on the Cross, p.
113).Furthermore, the slave diet
actually surpassed the levels of primary nutrients that were recommended in the
U.S. as late as 1964.“On average,”
note Fogel and Engerman, “slaves exceeded the daily recommended level of proteins
by 110 percent, calcium by 20 percent, and iron by 230 percent” (Time on the
Cross, p. 115).Many masters spent
extra money on expensive food like pork in order to cater to the dietary wishes
of their slaves, even though they could have fed them much cheaper foods like
fish or beef instead.When one planter
was asked why he bought pork for his slaves instead of feeding them with his
own beef, he replied that he did so because his slaves would be “miserable” if
they were deprived of pork (Fogel, Without Consent or Contract, p.
195).Fogel acknowledges that “most
southern planters considered the extra cost of conceding to their slaves’
dietary preferences was worth the price. . . .” (Without Consent or Contract,
p. 196).Perhaps these facts explain
why slaves had an average life expectancy that was longer than that of
whites in Italy and Austria and equal to that of whites in Holland and France
(Fogel and Engerman, Time on the Cross, p. 125).

Textbooks and documentaries often repeat the
Northern abolitionist claim that slaveholders engaged in widespread
slave-breeding and regularly had sexual relations with their female slaves,
with or without their consent.Fogel
and Engerman point out that the evidence for these charges is meager and
doubtful:

The evidence put
forward to support the contention of breeding for the market is meager
indeed.Aside from the differential in
profit rates produced by Conrad and Meyer, the evidence consists largely of
unverified charges made by abolitionists, and of certain demographic data.However, subsequent corrections of the work
of Conrad and Meyer have shown that rates of return on men and women were
approximately the same.And the many
thousands of hours of research by professional historians into plantation
records have failed to produce a single authenticated case of the “stud”
plantations alleged in abolitionist literature. . . .

Proponents of the
breeding thesis have been misled by their failure to recognize the difference
between human beings and animals.That
eugenic manipulation increases the fertility of animals does not mean it would
have the same effect on human beings.Not only does promiscuity increase venereal disease (an issue which does
not plague animal husbandry) and thereby reduce fertility, but emotional
factors are of considerable significance in successful human conception.These emotional factors, of course, also
carry over into the work routine.Distraught and disgruntled slaves did not make good field hands.

Consequently, most
planters shunned direct interference in the sexual practices of slaves, and
attempted to influence fertility patterns through a system of positive economic
incentives, incentives that are akin to those practiced by various governments
today.The United States, for example,
provides tax benefits for marriage and children; France has direct subsidies
for childbearing. . . .So too on the
plantation.

First and
foremost, planters promoted family formation both through exhortation and
through economic inducements.“Marriage
is to be encouraged,” wrote James Hammond to his overseer, “as it adds to the
comfort, happiness and health of those entering upon it, besides ensuring a
greater increase.”The economic
inducements for marriage generally included a house, a private plot of land
which the family could work on its own and, frequently, a bounty either in cash
or in household goods.The primary
inducements for childbearing were the lighter work load and the special care
given to expectant and new mothers.The
field-work requirement of women after the fifth month of pregnancy was
generally reduced by 40 or 50 percent.In the last month they were frequently taken off fieldwork altogether
and assigned such light tasks as sewing or spinning.Nursing mothers were permitted to leave for work at a later hour
than others and were also allowed three to four hours during the day for the
feeding of their infants. . . .

While there were
circumstances under which the economics of slavery encouraged widespread
promiscuity and concubinage . . . the main thrust of the economic incentives
generated by the American slave system operated against eugenic manipulation
and against sexual abuse.Those who
engaged in such acts did so, not because of their economic interests, but
despite them.Instructions from
slaveowners to their overseers frequently gave recognition to this
conflict.They contain explicit caveats
against “undue familiarity” which might undermine slave morale and discipline.“Having connection with any of my female
servants,” wrote a leading Louisiana planter, “will most certainly be visited
with a dismissal from my employment, and no excuse can or will be taken.”No set of instructions to overseers has been
uncovered which explicitly or implicitly encouraged selective breeding or
promiscuity. . . .

Antebellum critics
of slavery . . . accused slaveowners and overseers of turning plantations into
personal harems.They assumed that
because the law permitted slaveowners to ravish black women, the practice must
have been extremely common.They also
assumed that black women were, if not more licentious, at least more
promiscuous than white women, and hence less likely to resist sexual advances
by men, whether black or white.Moreover, the ravishing of black women by white men was not the only
aspect of sexual exploitation which devastated the slave family.There was also the policy of deliberate
slave-breeding, under which planters encouraged promiscuous relationships among
blacks. . . .

The evidence on
which these assumptions and conclusions were based was extremely limited.While none of the various travelers through
the South had seen deliberate slave-breeding practiced, they had all heard
reports of it.Some travelers published
conversations with men who admitted to fathering a large number of the slaves
on their plantations.Others wrote of
the special solicitude shown by one or another master to mulatto offspring, a
solicitude which in their minds strongly implied parenthood.There were also the descriptions of the
treatment of especially pretty slave women on the auction block and of the high
prices at which such women sold, prices too high to be warranted by field labor
and which could be explained only by their value as concubines or as
prostitutes.

Even if all these
reports were true, they constituted at most a few hundred cases.By themselves, such a small number of
observations out of a population of millions, could just as easily be used as
proof of the infrequency of the sexual exploitation of black women as of its frequency.
. . .The prevalence of mulattoes
convinced not only the northern public of the antebellum era, but historians of
today, that for each case of exploitation identified, there were thousands
which had escaped discovery.For
travelers to the South reported that a large proportion of the slaves were not
the deep black of Africans from the Guinea coast but tawny, golden, and white
or nearly white.Here was proof beyond
denial of either the ubiquity [widespread occurrence] of the exploitation of
black women by white men, or of the promiscuity of black women, or both.

But this seemingly
irrefutable evidence is far from conclusive.It is not the eyesight of these travelers to the South which is
questionable, but their statistical sense.For mulattoes were not distributed evenly through the Negro
population.They were concentrated in
the cities and especially among freedmen.According to the 1860 census, 39 percent of freedmen in southern cities
were mulattoes.Among urban slaves the
proportion of mulattoes was 20 percent.In other words, one out of every four Negroes living in a southern city
was a mulatto.But among rural slaves,
who constituted 95 percent of the slave population, only 9.9 percent were
mulatto in 1860.For the slave
population as a whole, therefore, the proportion of mulattoes was just 10.4
percent in 1860 and 7.7 percent in 1850.Thus it appears that travelers to the South greatly exaggerated the
extent of miscegenation because they came into contact with unrepresentative
samples of the Negro population. . . .Far from proving that the exploitation of black women was ubiquitous
[widespread], the available data on mulattoes strongly militate against that
contention.

The fact that
during the twenty-three decades of contact between slaves and whites which
elapsed between 1620 and 1850 only 7.7 percent of the slaves were mulattoes
suggests that on average only a very small percentage of the slaves were
fathered by white men.This inference
is not contradicted by the fact that the percentage of mulattoes increased by
one third during the last decade of the antebellum era, rising from 7.7 to 10.4
percent.For it must be remembered that
mulattoes were the progeny not just of unions between whites and pure blacks
but also of unions between mulattoes and blacks.Under common definition, a person with one-eighth ancestry of
another race was a mulatto.Consequently, the offspring of two slaves who were each one-eighth white
was to be classified as a mulatto, as was the offspring of any slave,
regardless of the ancestry of his or her mate, whose grandfather was a white.

A demographic
model of the slave population . . . shows that the census data alone cannot be
used to sustain the contention that a large proportion of slave children must
have been fathered by white men.And
other available bodies of evidence, such as the W.P.A. survey of former slaves,
throw such claims into doubt.Of those
in the survey who identified parentage, only 4.5 percent indicated that one of
their parents had been white.But the
work of geneticists on gene pools has revealed that even the last figure may be
too high.Measurements of the admixture
of “Caucasian” and “Negro” genes among southern rural blacks today indicate
that the share of Negro children fathered by whites on slave plantations
probably averaged between 1 and 2 percent.

That these
findings seem startling is due in large measure to the widespread assumption
that because the law permitted masters to ravage their slave women, they must
have exercised that right.As one
scholar recently put it, “Almost every white mother and wife connected with the
institution [of slavery] either actually or potentially shared the males in her
family with slave women.”The trouble
with this view is that it recognizes no forces operating on human behavior
other than the force of statute law.Yet many rights permitted by legal statues and judicial decisions are
not widely exercised, because economic and social forces militate against them.

To put the issue
somewhat differently, it has been presumed that masters and overseers must have
ravished black women frequently because their demand for such sexual pleasures
was high and because the cost of satisfying that demand was low.Such arguments overlook the real and
potentially large costs that confronted masters and overseers who sought sexual
pleasures in the slave quarters.The
seduction of the daughter or wife of a slave could undermine the discipline
that planters so assiduously strove to attain.Not only would it stir anger and discontent in the families affected,
but it would undermine the air of mystery and distinction on which so much of
the authority of large planters rested.Nor was it just a planter’s reputation in the slave quarter of his
plantation that would be at stake.While he might be able to prevent news of his nocturnal adventure from
being broadcast in his own house, it would be more difficult to prevent his
slaves from gossiping to slaves on other plantations. . . .

For the overseer,
the cost of sexual episodes in the slave quarter, once discovered, was often
his job.Nor would he find it easy to
obtain employment elsewhere as an overseer, since not many masters would be
willing to employ as their manager a man who was known to lack self-control on
so vital an issue.“Never employ an
overseer who will equalize himself with the negro women,” wrote Charles Tait to
his children.“Besides the morality of
it, there are evils too numerous to be now mentioned.”

Nor should one
underestimate the effect of racism on the demand of white males for black
sexual partners.While some white men
might have been tempted by the myth of black sexuality, a myth that may be
stronger today than it was in the antebellum South, it is likely that far
larger numbers were put off by racist aversions.Data on prostitutes support this conjecture. . . .The substantial underrepresentation of
Negroes, as well as the complete absence of dark-skinned Negroes, indicates
that white men who desired illicit sex had a strong preference for white women.
. . .

The contention
that the slave family was undermined by the widespread promiscuity of blacks is
as poorly founded as the thesis that masters were uninhibited in their sexual
exploitation of slave women.Indeed,
virtually no evidence, other than the allegations of white observers, has ever
been presented which sustains the charge that promiscuity among slaves was
greater than that found among whites. . . .

Unfortunately,
abolitionists and other antislavery critics were not free of racism merely
because they carried the banner or a moral struggle.With their greater physical separation from blacks, these writers
were often more gullible and more quick in their acceptance of certain racial
stereotypes than slaveholders. . . .

The available
demographic evidence on slaves suggests a picture of their sexual lives and
family behavior that has little in common with that conveyed by the
allegations.(Time on the Cross,
pp. 78-79, 84-86, 130-136)

For well over one hundred years, virtually
all books on slavery repeated the Northern abolitionist claim that slaves were
unproductive workers and that slave plantations were less productive than free
farms.Northern abolitionists argued
that slaves supposedly worked so poorly because they were trying to sabotage
their masters’ financial interests.But
the abolitionist assertion that slaves were less productive than free workers
has long since been refuted.Fogel:

Slave plantations
and laborers were not less efficient than free farms and free farmers. Slaves on small plantations who, like
ordinary field hands, worked in the fields alongside their masters were just as
productive as free farmers.But those
who toiled in the gangs of the intermediate and large plantations were on
average over 70 percent more productive than either free farmers or slaves on
small plantations.These gang laborers,
who in 1860 constituted about half of the adult slave population, worked so
intensely that they produced as much output in roughly 35 minutes as did free
farmers in a full hour. (Without Consent or Contract, p. 159)

Few books on slavery mention the fact that
many overseers were black.Instead, one
is usually given the impression that slaveholders almost always employed whites
as overseers.However, in point of fact,
most slaveholders used blacks as overseers.Fogel and Engerman:

Among
moderate-sized holdings (sixteen to fifty slaves) less than one out of every
six plantations used a white overseer.On large slaveholdings (over fifty slaves) only one out of every four
owners used white overseers.Even on
estates with more than one hundred slaves, the proportion with white overseers
was just 30 percent, and on many of these the planters were usually in
residence. (Time on the Cross, pp. 200-201; see also p. 211)

What did outside observers say about
slavery?Europeans visited the South
and left us their impressions of slavery. Civil War scholar John Tilley
observed that their accounts suggest that most slaves were treated humanely:

Among these were
Buckingham and Sir Charles Lyell, both Englishmen of distinction. Interestedly
appraising the status of house-servants of his Southern hosts, Buckingham wrote
that their situation was quite comparable to that of servants in the middle
rank of life in his own country. He goes on record that, as a rule, they were
"well-fed, well-dressed. . . ." Lyell's investigation led to a like
conclusion: namely, that these house-slaves enjoyed advantages superior to
those experienced by white servants in similar work in Europe. He found himself
in agreement with the view expressed by William Thompson; after traveling in
the South, Thompson, a Scotch weaver, had made public his finding that he had
not seen in slave conditions one-fifth of the suffering which was the lot of
employees in British factories. Observers of the high type of Chevalier,
Fredrika Bremer, and Achille Murat, drew similar contrasts between the
conditions prevailing among the "peasants" and "poor working
people" of Europe and those obtaining in the slave sections of the United
States. Bremer's verdict was that the slaves were "much better provided
for."

Yet others came
from abroad to be astonished by the variance between fiction and fact relative
to slavery conditions. Lady Wortly found the Southern negroes generally happy
and contented. Grund's observations convinced him that they were better cared
for than the free negro element he had seen in the North. Charles Mackay
singled out the farm labor of Europe, the shop tailors and seamstresses of the
great English cities, as living in physical surroundings inferior to those of
the slaves. In his work, Life and Liberty in America, MacKay called attention
to the "paternal and patriarchal kindness" of many among the masters.

A digression may
be indulged. True to his Northern preconceptions, historian [James] Rhodes
manifests unmistakable annoyance because of the reports of the foreign
visitors. He proceeds to use his scalpel and the result of his dissection of
the phenomenon is the pronouncement that, with the exception of the Scotch
weaver who likely mingled only with the less favored class, the opinions of the
travelers were possibly colored by their enjoyment of "the generous
hospitality of the Southern gentlemen." Such an evaluation of the
effectiveness of social contact with slave-owners in beclouding the judgment of
astute foreign investigators presents, perhaps, the climax of tributes to
Southern courtesy and charm. (The Coming of the Glory, pp. 27-28)

Tilley continued by arguing that the
findings of Northern student Frederick Law Olmsted and of a Northern governess
agree with those of the European visitors:

A few years prior
to the War between the States, a Northern student, Frederick Law Olmsted, made
tours of various sections of the South in order personally to view the situation
of negro bondman. In 1856, in a volume entitled Journey in the Seaboard States,
he shared with the public the benefit of his findings. Some of these, it may be
worthwhile briefly to summarize.

Generally,
according to Olmsted, the slaves had food in plenty; in fact, it was his
opinion that in this respect they were better provisioned for than "the
proletarian class of any other part of the world." While in South
Carolina, he noted that the house-servants were intelligent, competent, and comfortably
dressed. Regarding the consideration given their "health and
comfort," he believed it superior to that usually bestowed upon free
domestics. His judgment was that the labor required of the negroes would not be
considered excessively hard by free labor in the North. It interested him to
find that, in their employment in the fields, the rule was to assign to each a
specific task; this performed, his work for the day was done. He had personally
observed a number of significant scenes, such as slaves leaving the field by
one or two o'clock, the remainder of the day to be theirs to use as they
willed. On one plantation he had seen, between three and four o'clock, "a
dozen women and several men" returning to their quarters, their day's work
completed. The slaves on "Mr. X's plantation" were treated with
uniform kindness. . . .

Rhodes tells of a
New England-born governess, employed on a Tennessee plantation, who expressed
astonishment that there had failed to show up the "revolting horrors"
of which she had heard. Her wonder had grown upon learning that physical
punishment was there unknown; willingly, she testified to the sharp contrast
between actual conditions and what her preconceived theories had prepared her
to expect. (The Coming of the Glory, pp. 28-29)

Before we conclude this section, let’s take
a moment to consider what the slaveholders themselves said in response to the
charges of the abolitionists:

They vigorously
denied promoting promiscuity and practicing barnyard techniques to increase
fertility.Although admitting that some
masters abused their power, seducing or raping slave women, they argued that
these were isolated cases and that such behavior was condemned by the
generality of masters.They pictured themselves
as devoted family men who promoted stable family lives among their slaves.Although they acknowledged their adherence
to a pronatalist [pro-childbirth] policy, they insisted that this was in
keeping with church doctrine, both Catholic and Protestant, and that their
means of implementing this policy among the slaves—bounties of various sorts
for married couples, released time and special rations for nursing and pregnant
women, bounties for parents of large numbers of children—were along lines
sanctified by religion and long practiced by civilized states.They also acknowledged that the slave trade
was an impediment to family life but contended that its deleterious [harmful]
effects were exaggerated.Masters forced
to sell slaves for economic reasons, they insisted, sought either to sell
slaves who were still single or to sell them in family groups.

As for food,
clothing, shelter, and medical care, they argued that masters were at great
pains to see that slaves were well taken care of in these respects because it
was to their economic interests to do so.Far from being poorly treated, they claimed that slaves were better fed,
clothed, and sheltered than free laborers in the cities of the North.To support their case they called attention
to census and local registration data that showed that death rates were higher
in northern cities than on slave plantations, turning the arguments that
British abolitionists had used to condemn West Indian slavery into a critique
of northern society.They also denied
that slaves were overworked, except in isolated cases, claiming that the daily
hours on plantations were the normal ones for agriculture, that there was no
work on the Sabbath, and that slaves also received part of a day, or all day,
off on many Saturdays, on rainy days, and on various holidays. (Fogel, Without
Consent or Contract, pp. 121-122)

As we have seen, there is a great deal of
truth in what the slaveholders said in defense of the way they administered
slavery.Most of these men treated
their slaves humanely.One can make the
case that Southern slaveholders treated their slaves better than many Northern
factory owners treated their workers.Most former slaves who discussed their treatment said their masters were
good men who treated them well.

All this being said, slavery was still wrong.
It had its positive aspects, and it was usually administered humanely, but it
was still wrong.It was wrong because
it’s wrong to hold humans in bondage against their will if they have committed
no crime.My only point in noting some
of the good aspects of slavery is to provide a little balance to the one-sided
picture that is usually painted of it.There were many forms of injustice in the world in the nineteenth
century. Southern slavery was one of them, but it was by no means the worst of
them. The exploitation of free workers
in many Northern factories was arguably just as bad as slavery, if not worse in
a good number of cases.The terrible
abuse that slaves experienced on Northern slave ships was far worse than
anything they experienced on most Southern plantations and farms.

Moreover, it’s important to keep in mind
that most Southerners did not own slaves. According to the 1860 census, 69
percent of Southern families did not own slaves.Scholars generally agree that only about 25 percent of Southern
citizens were slaveholders. Notes Stampp,

Nearly
three-fourths of all free Southerners had no connection with slavery through
either family ties or direct ownership. The "typical" Southerner was
not only a small farmer but also a nonslaveholder. (The Peculiar Institution,
p. 30)

Of those Southerners who did own slaves,
three-fourths owned less than ten. Half owned less than five, and often worked
side by side with them in the fields. As for the "planter class,"
less than fifteen percent of slaveholders belonged to it. "The planter
aristocracy," says Stampp, "was limited to some ten thousand
families. . . ." (The Peculiar Institution, p. 30).

Slavery and the Federal Government’s Use
of Force

Given these and other facts, I don't believe
the existence of slavery in the South justified the federal government’s use of
force to deny the South its independence. I don't believe that Southern slavery
justified the brutal form of "total war" that federal armies waged
against the South. This brand of warfare included the needless destruction of
thousands of private homes and public buildings, the large-scale theft of
private belongings, the burning of priceless Southern libraries, the killing of
thousands of farm animals (even in remote areas), and the shelling of
defenseless towns. Some idea of the brutality that was inflicted on the South
is indicated by the fact that about 50,000 Southern civilians died in the war
(Kenneth C. Davis, Don’t Know Much About the Civil War, Avon Books
Edition, New York: Avon Books, 1997, p. 411).

Nor do I believe that Southern slavery
justified Lincoln's policy of blocking medicines from reaching the South. This
cruel policy caused the needless deaths of tens of thousands of Confederate
soldiers and of thousands of Southern civilians (Charles, Roland, The
Confederacy, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1960, pp. 152-153).
This policy also caused the deaths of thousands of Union soldiers who were
being held in Confederate prisoner of war camps. When the South tried to buy
medical supplies from the federal government to care for Union prisoners,
Lincoln wouldn't even reply to the offer. Noted Tilley,

The time came
when, shut off from the world by blockade [the federal blockade], the South
experienced the greatest difficulty in obtaining medicine which had been made
contraband by order of the federal government. By 1864 conditions were so
desperate that the South actually offered to purchase from the North such
needed supplies, agreeing to pay for them in gold, cotton, or tobacco. The
offer made plain that Union surgeons might bring the medicines down and use
them solely to minister to Union prisoners. To this offer, there was no reply.
(Facts the Historians Leave Out, Ashland City, Tennessee: Nippert
Publishing, 1993, reprint, p. 52)

I'm glad slavery was abolished, but it could
and should have been abolished peacefully. Yes, this would have taken longer,
maybe a lot longer. But it also would have saved the lives of over 600,000
soldiers who died in the war, as well as the lives of tens of thousands of
Southern civilians who died as a result of the brutal type of warfare that
federal armies waged in the South. It also would have spared tens of thousands
of soldiers from suffering the loss of arms and legs for the rest of their
lives. Other nations found ways to abolish slavery peacefully. I don't believe
we needed to wage the most destructive war in our nation's history before
slavery could be abolished.It’s
important to understand that slavery was not abolished during the war;
it was abolished several months after the war with the passage of the 13th
Amendment.

We will never know what
would have happened to Southern slavery if the North had allowed the South to
go in peace. The Confederacy was never given the chance to outgrow slavery.
There were plenty of people in the South who did not like slavery and/or who
wanted to see the slaves freed, including Confederate generals Robert E. Lee,
Joseph E. Johnston, and Stonewall Jackson, Confederate Congressman Duncan
Kenner, and James Spence, the Confederate financial agent in Europe, who
criticized slavery in his book The American Union (Patrick, Jefferson
Davis and His Cabinet, p. 196).There were also Confederate leaders who supported emancipating slaves
who served in the Confederate army, such as Confederate generals Patrick
Cleburne, Daniel Govan, John H. Kelly, and Marc Lowrey, Governor William Smith
of Virginia, Confederate Secretary of State Judah Benjamin, and the Confederate
president himself, Jefferson Davis.It’s worth repeating that some 75 percent of Southerners did not own
slaves.

I believe the Confederacy
would have eventually abolished slavery, either actively or passively. There is
some evidence that suggests slavery was beginning to die out on its own.For example, the percentage of Southern
whites who belonged to slaveholding families dropped by 5 percent from
1850-1860 (Robert Divine, T. H. Bren, George Fredrickson, and R. Hal Williams, America
Past and Present, Fifth Edition, New York: Longman, 1999, p. 389). Nevins
noted that "slavery was dying all around the edges of its domain" (The
Emergence of Lincoln, Volume 2, p. 469).Historians Randall and Donald, after noting the Confederacy’s move
toward officially using slaves as soldiers and the support of key Confederate leaders
for granting freedom to slaves and their families for faithful military
service, acknowledged that the Confederacy may very well have abolished slavery
even if it had survived the war:

On November 7, 1864, President Davis went so far as to
approve the employment of slave-soldiers as preferable to subjugation, and on
February 11, 1865, the Confederate House of Representatives voted that if the
Presidentshould not be able to raise
sufficient troops otherwise, he was authorized to call for additional levies
“from such classes . . . irrespective of color . . . as the . . . authorities .
. . may determine”. . . .There was no
mistaking the meaning of this action.The fundamental social concept of slavery was slipping; an opening wedge
for emancipation had been inserted.Lee’s opinion agreed with that of the President and Congress.On January 11, 1865, he wrote advising the
enlistment of slaves as soldiers and the granting of “immediate freedom to all
who enlist, and freedom at the end of the war to the families of those who
discharge their duties faithfully. . . .”This fact, together with other indications, suggests that, even if the
Confederacy had survived the war, there was a strong possibility that slavery
would be voluntarily abandoned in the South. (The Civil War and
Reconstruction, p. 522)

We must be careful not to judge a country or
a people through our twenty-first-century lens. Past nations and their citizens
should be judged primarily in the context of their own times and not in the
context of our times. One hundred years from now, who is to say that future
civilizations won't look back and denounce modern America as an unjust,
oppressive nation because we have legalized the killing of hundreds of
thousands of innocent unborn children every year by abortion, because we still
have not extended basic health care to all of our citizens, and because we
continue to pollute the environment with toxic waste and fossil fuel emissions?
Over the last thirty years alone, more innocent human beings have been killed
by abortion than were ever killed by slavery (even including the thousands who
died on the slave ships). Or, consider how many low-income people in our
country have died prematurely because they had substandard health care or no
health care at all. This tragic injustice is no secret. Numerous stories about
it have appeared on TV, in newspapers, and in books for decades. Yet, it
continues. Will future civilizations look back and judge America harshly
because of this? Will we be condemned as a cruel, elitist society? How would we
feel if Islamic nations teamed up to invade America because we permit and
uphold abortion? How would we feel if Russia and China teamed up to invade
America because we don't have universal health care and because we're the
world's biggest polluter? What if England, France, and Russia had teamed up to
invade the Northern states in the early 1800s because New England permitted and
reaped huge profits from the African slave trade and because so many Northern
states strongly discriminated against blacks?

More on the Confederacy

This is not to say the Confederacy was
perfect. But, in comparison to other nations in that era, and even to many
nations in our day, the Confederacy was one of the most democratic countries in
the world. The Confederacy came into existence in a peaceful, democratic
manner, with the support of the overwhelming majority of Southern citizens. In
fact, the percentage of Southern citizens who supported the formation of the
Confederate States of America was considerably larger than the percentage of
colonial citizens who supported the American Revolution (Roland, The
Confederacy, pp. 14-15; cf. Divine et al, America Past and Present,
pp. 159-161). Throughout its existence, the Confederacy enjoyed a vibrant free
press. The Confederate government closely resembled the federal government,
with three separate branches of power, i.e., executive, legislative, judicial.
Confederate laws went through the legislative process. The Confederate
Constitution was very similar to the U.S. Constitution, and it contained
improvements that even some Northern writers praised. The Confederacy held free
and fair elections. Citizens of the Confederacy enjoyed every right that we now
enjoy, if not more.

The Confederacy made every effort to
establish peaceful relations with the federal government. The Confederate
government even offered to pay compensation for all federal facilities in the
South and to pay the Southern states' fair share of the national debt. The
Confederacy also announced that Northern ships could continue to use the
Mississippi River. The record is clear that the South sought to avoid war. In
fact, most Southerners believed secession would be peaceful. It's interesting
to note that the correspondence of the first Confederate Secretary of War,
Leroy Walker, "clearly indicates he did not expect war" (Patrick, Jefferson
Davis and His Cabinet, p. 106). The Confederate states believed, with good
reason, that since they had joined the Union voluntarily and peacefully, they had
every right to voluntarily and peacefully leave the Union. But war came when
the federal government launched an invasion of the Confederate states. That's
why the vast majority of battles were fought in the South. The South fought
because it was invaded. The South had no desire to overthrow the federal
government--it merely wanted to leave that government and to form its own.

The Confederacy did not start the war, and,
contrary to what most history books claim or imply, the war didn't really begin
when Confederate forces attacked Fort Sumter, South Carolina. Lincoln later
admitted he provoked the incident so that he could blame the South for firing
the first shot and thus use that as an excuse for going to war.

Soon after South Carolina seceded, federal forces,
acting without orders to do so, occupied Fort Sumter, in violation of the
agreement that South Carolina had (or certainly thought it had) with President
James Buchanan not to change the status quo. Southern leaders argued that South
Carolina had the legal right to reclaim Fort Sumter, citing the fact that the
state had ceded the fort to the federal government on certain conditions and
that these conditions had not been fulfilled. (Jefferson Davis, The Rise and
Fall of the Confederate Government, Volume 1, New York: De Capo Press,
1990, reprint of 1881 edition, pp. 179-180). South Carolina, and then the
Confederacy, tried for months to have Fort Sumter evacuated. Lincoln's
Secretary of State, William Seward, promised Confederate representatives the fort
would be evacuated, but this promise was not kept.

When Confederate leaders learned that,
contrary to Seward's promise, Lincoln had sent a convoy of warships and other
vessels to resupply the fort, they decided to demand the fort's surrender. The
commander of the federal garrison on the fort refused, even though he did not
agree with Lincoln's decision to send a resupply convoy (Davis, The Rise and
Fall of the Confederate Government, Vol. 1, pp. 243-244). The Confederates
then gave the federal commander advance notice the fort would be attacked. Not
a single Union soldier was killed in the attack. As a matter of fact, at one
point, when the Confederates feared a fire on the fort was going to burn out of
control, they offered to help put out the fire. When the federal troops
surrendered, the Confederates allowed them to surrender with full military
honors and then permitted them to return to the North in peace. This was the
"attack," the alleged act of "rebellion" or
"insurrection," that Lincoln used as his pretext for launching an
invasion of the seceded states. On the other hand, even after the Fort Sumter
incident, Jefferson Davis continued to publicly express his desire for peaceful
relations with the North. In fact, just two weeks after the Fort Sumter incident,
Davis said the following in a message to the Confederate Congress:

We protest
solemnly, in the face of mankind, that we desire peace at any sacrifice, save
that of honor. In independence we seek no conquest, no aggrandizement, no
concession of any kind from the States with which we have lately been
confederated. All we ask is to be let alone--that those who never held power
over us shall not now attempt our subjugation by arms. (The Rise and Fall of
the Confederate Government, Vol. 1, pp. 283-284; see also Cooper, Jefferson
Davis, American, p. 367)

Was the War Fought Over Slavery?

Many historians seek to justify the federal
government's invasion of the South by claiming that the war was fought over slavery,
and that Union forces were fighting to free the slaves while the South was
fighting to keep them in bondage. A number of critics claim the South only
fought in order to ensure the continuation of slavery. A detailed refutation of
these assertions would require a separate paper. However, for now, I offer the
following points in response to them:

* The war was fought over secession, not
over slavery. If the South had not declared its independence, Lincoln would not
have launched an invasion, and there would have been no war. The only slave
states that were charged with insurrection and then invaded were those that
belonged to the Confederacy. Would Lincoln and his fellow Republicans have
accepted secession if the Confederacy had announced it was abolishing slavery
as the first official act of its existence? Would the Republicans have allowed
a peaceful separation if the Confederacy had started an emancipation program
right after the First Battle of Manassas (Bull Run)? Any serious student of the
Civil War will agree that the answer to both of these questions is no.I don't think anyone who has studied the
subject believes the Republicans would have allowed the South to go in peace no
matter when the Confederacy would have started to abolish slavery.

* In July 1861, the U.S. House of
Representatives passed a resolution, by a nearly unanimous vote, that affirmed
that the North was not waging the war to overthrow slavery but to preserve the
Union (Klingaman, Abraham Lincoln and the Road to Emancipation, pp.
66-70). McPherson notes,

. . . in 1861 the
North was fighting for the restoration of a slaveholding Union. In his July 4
message to Congress, Lincoln reiterated the inaugural pledge that he had
"no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with slavery in the
States where it exists." (Ordeal By Fire, p. 265)

* When Lincoln assumed office, he was
entirely willing to allow slavery to continue. Lincoln even supported a
constitutional amendment that would have given additional legal protection to
slavery. When Lincoln issued his famous Emancipation Proclamation about two
years later, he did so largely because he was under intense pressure from
abolitionist Republicans in Congress, who were threatening to cut off funds from
the army if Lincoln didn't issue some kind of emancipation statement. One only
has to read the Emancipation Proclamation itself to see that it was a war
measure that only applied to slaves who were in Confederate territory; it did
not apply to any slaves who were in Union-controlled territory, not even to
slaves who were in the four Union slave states. In addition, Bennett presents
evidence that Lincoln himself tried to undermine the proclamation soon after he
issued it, and that he issued it unwillingly (Forced Into Glory, pp.
22-29, 411-508). For that matter, Lincoln only began to consider issuing the
proclamation after the Union war effort continued to falter (Klingaman, Abraham
Lincoln and the Road to Emancipation, pp. 134-139; Robert Divine et al, America
Past and Present, p. 460.)

* To be sure, some members of the Republican
Party did believe the war should be waged for the purpose of abolishing
slavery. Those who belonged to this faction of the party were commonly known as
"Radical Republicans."

* There were important economic and
political differences between the North and the South that were major reasons
for the South's desire for independence. Prior to secession, the South had
complained for decades about unfair, unconstitutional Northern economic
policies, especially tariff policy. One of the seven ordinances of secession
and two of the Declarations of Causes of Secession of the Deep South states
mention unfair Northern economic policies. Jefferson Davis mentioned the
South's complaints about Northern protectionist tariff policies in his first
message to the Confederate congress (he cited the North's imposition of
"burdens on commerce as a protection to their manufacturing and shipping
interests"). In his famous speech on secession to the Georgia legislature,
Robert Toombs spent the first half of the speech listing some of the South's
economic complaints against the North, and he cited these complaints as reasons
the South needed to be independent. Historian Frank Owsley discussed some of
the reasons for these complaints:

The industrial
North demanded a high tariff so as to monopolize the domestic markets,
especially the Southern market. . . . It was an exploitative principle,
originated at the expense of the South and for the benefit of the North. . . .

The industrial
section demanded a national subsidy for the shipping business and merchant
marine, but, as the merchant marine was alien to the Southern agrarian system,
the two sections clashed. It was once more an exploitation of one section for
the benefit of the other.

The industrial
North demanded internal improvements--roads, railroads, canals, at national
expense to furnish transportation for its goods to Southern and Western markets
which were already hedged around for the benefit of the North by the tariff
wall. . . .

It is interesting
to observe that all the favors thus asked by the North were of doubtful
constitutional right. . . . Even in the matter of public lands the South
favored turning over these lands to the state within which they lay, rather
than have them controlled by the federal government. . . . ("The
Irrepressible Conflict," in Edwin C. Rozwenc, editor, The Causes of the
American Civil War, Second Edition, Lexington, Massachusetts: D. C. Heath
and Company, 1972, pp. 108-109)

Even after the war, the North's economic
exploitation of the South continued for decades. For example, Kenneth C. Davis,
although he is critical of the South on many points, concedes that Southern
railroad companies were "burdened for decades by unfair rates and
restrictive tariffs set by Northerners, who controlled the vast majority of
railways and the legislatures that set rates" (Don't Know Much About
the Civil War, pp. 425-426).

* Southern leaders had valid reasons for
their belief that monetary considerations played a major role in the North's
decision to invade the South. It was no secret that the North did not want
Southern ports to be able to trade directly with Europe because they knew
European businesses would naturally be attracted by the Confederacy's extremely
low tariff, as opposed to the North's high tariff. In addition, the North
didn't want to lose the tariff revenue that the federal government collected
from the Southern states. I think it’s revealing that in his first inaugural
address, Lincoln threatened to invade the seceded states if they didn’t pay the
federal tariff. He didn’t threaten to invade over slavery. But he said there
would be an invasion if the seceded states didn’t pay the federal tariff:

The power confided
to me will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the property and places
belonging to the Government and to collect the duties and imposts; but beyond
what may be necessary for these objects, there will be no invasion, no using of
force against or among the people anywhere. (First Inaugural Address, March 4,
1861)

Lincoln was a master at using clever wording
that could blunt the full impact of what he was saying. But his meaning in this
statement is readily discernible. He named two "objects" over which
he would use force in order to carry them out, and one of those objects was
"to collect the duties and imposts," i.e., the federal tariff.
Southern leaders resented this threat, especially since the Southern states
paid an unfairly large amount of the tariff and since the tariff rates had just
been markedly increased. The fact that Lincoln was prepared to invade if the
tariff wasn’t paid shows that monetary considerations played a significant role
in the North’s decision to use force against the seceded states.

* In order to understand the Civil War, one
must take into account the inflammatory anti-Southern propaganda that numerous
Northern leaders and newspapers spread for years prior to the war. Northern
abolitionist attacks on slavery were often misleading and exaggerated. These attacks
frequently included unfair attacks on the South as a whole. Northern agitators
unfairly attacked the South on a wide range of issues. In her book, North
Over South: Northern Nationalism and American Identity in the Antebellum Era
(Lawrence, Kansas: University of Kansas Press, 2000), British scholar
Susan-Mary Grant documents the harsh anti-Southern propaganda that Northern
leaders, writers, and newspapers spread in the decades leading up to the war,
especially from around 1840 onward. During the five years that preceded the
war, numerous Republican leaders and pro-Republican newspapers frequently
portrayed Southerners as barbaric, ignorant, depraved, and even un-American. In
the 1860 presidential election, the Republican Party distributed an abridged version
of a book entitled The Impending Crisis of the South, which spoke
approvingly of a scenario where slaves would rise up and kill their masters.
Not only did the Republican Party distribute this book, but in the version that
the party printed, Republican editors added such captions as "The Stupid
Masses of the South" and "Revolution--Peacefully if we can, Violently
if we must." The "Revolution . . . Violently if we must"
statement referred to inciting slave revolts that would potentially cause the
deaths of thousands or even tens of thousands of Southern citizens.

* As one reads the speeches and letters of
Confederate leaders during the war, it becomes apparent that they certainly
didn't believe their main reason for fighting was the preservation of slavery.For example, beginning in late 1862, James
Phelan, Joseph Bradford, and Reuben Davis wrote to Jefferson Davis to express
concern that some opponents were claiming the war "was for the defense of
the institution of slavery" (Cooper, Jefferson Davis, American, pp.
479-480, 765). They called those who were making this claim
"demagogues." Cooper notes that when two Northerners visited
Jefferson Davis during the war, Davis insisted "the Confederates were not
battling for slavery" and that "slavery had never been the key
issue" (Jefferson Davis, American, p. 524).

* There is no doubt the issue of slavery was
the main, immediate factor that led the original seven states of the
Confederacy to secede, but it was certainly not the only factor. It's crucial
to understand that secession and the war were two different events. The
election of Lincoln and the Radical Republicans in 1860 was the reason the Deep
South states seceded. The issue of slavery was the biggest reason they decided
to secede when Lincoln was elected, though, as mentioned, it was by no means
the only reason.

What about the four other states of the
Confederacy? Why did they secede? They only seceded after Lincoln announced he
was going to invade the Deep South. In fact, in two of those four states, the
people themselves voted on the question of secession and voted against it.In the two other states, democratically
elected secession conventions voted against secession.However, when Lincoln announced he was going
to invade the seceded states, new votes were held, and in each of them
secession won by overwhelming margins.

The causes of secession were not the causes
of the war, and secession did not have to lead to war. The Republicans could
have allowed the South to go in peace, but they chose not to do so. The direct
cause of the war itself was the federal invasion of the South. The battles
started when federal armies invaded the Southern states in an effort to destroy
the Confederacy and to force the South back into the Union.

* Precious few textbooks mention the fact
that by 1864 key Confederate leaders, including Jefferson Davis, were prepared
to abolish slavery. As early as 1862 some Confederate leaders supported various
forms of emancipation. In 1864 Jefferson Davis officially recommended that
slaves who performed faithful service in non-combat positions in the
Confederate army should be freed.Robert E. Lee and many other Confederate generals favored emancipating
slaves who served in the Confederate army.In fact, Lee had long favored the abolition of slavery and had called
the institution a "moral and political evil" years before the war
(McPherson, The Battle Cry of Freedom, New York: Ballantine Books, 1988,
p. 281; Recollections and Letters of Robert E. Lee, New York: Barnes and
Noble Books, 2003, reprint, pp. 231-232). By late 1864, Davis was prepared to
abolish slavery in order to gain European diplomatic recognition and thus save
the Confederacy.Duncan Kenner, one of
the biggest slaveholders in the South and the chairman of the Ways and Means
Committee of the Confederate House of Representatives, strongly supported this
proposal. So did the Confederate Secretary of State, Judah Benjamin. Davis
informed congressional leaders of his intentions, and then sent Kenner to
Europe to make the proposal.Davis even
made Kenner a minister plenipotentiary so as to ensure he could make the
proposal to the British and French governments and that it would be taken
seriously.

The Radical Republicans

It would be worthwhile to take a closer look
at the Radical Republicans.They
wielded tremendous power in their party. They were not only abolitionists, but,
like most other Republicans of their day, they tended to support higher taxes
(in the form of high tariff rates), subsidies and land grants to certain big
businesses, and the expansion of the federal government's size and power.
Southern leaders consistently opposed these policies. Most Radical Republicans
made no secret of their hatred of the South. Southern leaders suspected that
some of the Radicals didn't really care about the slaves but were using slavery
as an excuse to crush and subjugate the South. The harsh, illegal
Reconstruction program that the Radical Republicans in Congress imposed on the
South after the war led many people, in all sections of the country, to believe
this suspicion was justified. Even President Andrew Johnson said in an official
message that the Reconstruction regime that the Radicals wanted to impose on
the South was illegal, vengeful, and despotic (Lloyd Paul Stryker, Andrew
Johnson: A Study in Courage, New York: The MacMillan Company, 1930, pp.
263-285; see also Johnson's veto message of the first Reconstruction act).
Johnson tried to prevent the Radicals from imposing such harsh terms by vetoing
their Reconstruction bill, but they had enough votes to override his veto. When
Johnson persisted in opposing the Radicals, they indicted him and then tried to
remove him from office on the basis of charges that can only be described as
shameful, not to mention invalid (Stryker, Andrew Johnson, pp. 572-674;
see also Randall and Donald, The Civil War and Reconstruction, pp.
601-617).

Almost immediately after Lincoln was
assassinated, Radical Republicans in Congress and in the War Department, along
with Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, falsely accused Jefferson Davis and other
Confederate leaders of complicity in Lincoln's death. A War Department military
tribunal and the House Judiciary Committee formally endorsed this claim. They
based this accusation on information they knew was bogus. Some Radicals
continued to repeat the accusation even after it became clear that it was
false. Cooper notes that most people came to reject the claim that Davis was
involved in Lincoln's death:

In the immediate
aftermath of Lincoln's assassination . . . the War Department, with Secretary
Stanton's enthusiastic endorsement, claimed that Davis was intimately involved
in the conspiracy that resulted in Lincoln's murder as well as other failed
intrigues. . . . In subsequent investigations this supposedly crystal-clear
certainty turned murky. A few officials clung to the theory of Davis's
responsibility, but most observers found the evidence flimsy, even fraudulent.
(Jefferson Davis, American, pp. 582-583)

The story of the Radical Republicans'
attempt to convict Jefferson Davis of involvement in Lincoln's death is one of
the most shameful episodes in American history, and it says a lot about how
utterly lawless and corrupt some Republicans were.I'm unaware of a single textbook that says anything about the Radicals’
unethical conduct in the affair. Therefore, I'd like to devote a few paragraphs
to examining some aspects of their attempt to frame Davis for Lincoln's death.
One of the best treatments of the subject is Seymour Frank's booklet The
Conspiracy Against Jefferson Davis (Biloxi, Mississippi: The Beauvoir
Press, 1987). The booklet originally appeared as an article in The
Mississippi Valley Historical Review (March 1954) under the title "The
Conspiracy to Implicate the Confederate Leaders in Lincoln's Assassination."
In his foreword to Frank's booklet, historian James West Thompson discusses
some aspects of the attempt to blame Davis for Lincoln's murder:

A surprise witness
at the Lincoln conspirators' trial was a man who identified himself as Henry
Von Steinacker, who claimed to have attended a meeting of Confederate officers
who were planning Lincoln's murder. Shortly after his testimony, defense
counsel learned that Von Steinacker had been a member of the Union Army and had
been arrested while attempting to desert. Sentenced to death, he had escaped
while awaiting execution. Joining the Confederate forces of General Edward
Johnson, he had been assigned to headquarters as a draftsman, but he was
arrested by the Confederates and accused of theft and of abuse of prisoners.
Again he escaped. Defense Attorney Clampitt was denounced by General Lew
Wallace . . . for stating these facts. Judge Advocate General Joseph Holt [who
headed the Bureau of Military Justice] hypocritically stated that he would be
happy to return "Von Steinacker" to the courtroom if only he could be
found. It later developed that when "Von Steinacker" testified, he
had been a Federal prisoner named Hans Von Winklestein and was serving a
sentence for desertion. He had, with the full knowledge of the prosecution,
been allowed to testify to lies under a false name, and he was then released
from prison immediately afterwards as a reward for his lies.

There were three
other "witnesses" who were the backbone of the trial and who supplied
the basis of the verdict. All were perjurers for hire, and they were hired by
Judge Advocate General Joseph Holt. Foremost was . . . Sanford Conover, alias
James Watson Wallace, but whose true name was Charles A. Dunham, a totally
unscrupulous New York lawyer. He brought together a group of minor characters
whom he drilled in stories he wrote out for each one and drilled them in
reciting the stories until they were letter-perfect. Then they gave the
depositions of these stories to Judge Holt personally. Only he took their
statements. Conover's testimony and that of his "witnesses" proved to
be a mass of lies. But Judge Holt continued to use him and to pay him even
after he had been thoroughly exposed. . . .

Second of these
perjurers was a man who claimed to be Richard Montgomery. His real name was
James Thompson, and he was a convicted New York burglar with a long record of
felonies.

The third of these
perjurers was known as Dr. James B. Merritt, who later confessed to a committee
of the House of Representatives that his testimony had been a tissue of lies,
for which the government had paid him $6,000. . . . It was on the basis of the
lies of these men that Secretary of War Stanton was able to induce new
President Andrew Johnson to issue his offer of rewards for the capture of
Jefferson Davis and several other Confederates, accused of having plotted
Lincoln's death. Stanton claimed that this was on the basis of evidence in the
possession of the Bureau of Military Justice. Stanton knew that this was false,
that no evidence was held, and that only unsworn, oral statements, never
reduced to writing, had been obtained. (Foreword, The Conspiracy Against
Jefferson Davis, pp. 5-6)

Time permits me to quote only a small part
of Frank's analysis:

The news of
President Lincoln's assassination came as a terrific blow to the people of the
North. . . . Stanton immediately informed the stunned world that Lincoln's
assassination had been the outcome of a general plot to murder the President,
his cabinet, and leading Union generals. It was engineered, he charged, by
Jefferson Davis and other Southern leaders. . . .

Through bribes and
offers of rewards, Stanton's assistants were able to assemble a group of
persons who seemed willing to perjure themselves to aid the Secretary in
achieving his goal. . . .

In the trial
before the military tribunal the prosecution had attempted to establish this
complicity [of Davis in Lincoln's death] primarily by the testimony of three
witnesses. This attempt had failed despite the fact that the military court, by
its verdict, had indicated otherwise.

The three
witnesses were Richard Montgomery, Dr. James B. Merritt, and Sanford Conover.
By his own admissions, each had done much to discredit his story and to impeach
his personal credibility. Holt knew that their stories would not stand public
scrutiny and tried to keep their testimony secret. This endeavor had failed. .
. . The entire evidence of the three was therefore given to the newspapers.

In early June
[1865], this suppressed evidence appeared in the leading American and Canadian
papers. Bitter denunciations, indignant denials, and angry countercharges
followed. The witnesses had alleged that most of the plotting had occurred in
Toronto and Montreal. The newspapers in both cities were swamped with letters
and statements, all tending to establish that Montgomery, Merritt, and Conover
were men of poor reputation and that their testimony was false. (The
Conspiracy Against Jefferson Davis, pp. 11-12, 17-18)

Although President Johnson allowed several
people to be tried and hung as conspirators in Lincoln's death, he came to
realize that the "evidence" against Davis was false. Incredibly, when
it became apparent that Johnson was not going to allow Davis to be brought to
trial on the basis of this evidence, two Radical Republicans in Congress
plotted with Sanford Conover to produce false evidence that would connect
Johnson himself with Lincoln's assassination. Yes, two Republican members of
Congress conspired to falsely accuse a sitting president with involvement in
the previous president's murder. And, yes, they did so with the same Sanford
Conover, one of the discredited Davis-conspiracy witnesses. The two Republicans
were Representatives James Ashley and Benjamin Butler. The scheme failed
because Conover, fearing the two Congressmen weren't keeping their part of the
deal, decided to reveal the plot to Johnson; he turned over to the president
several documents that exposed the plan. Needless to say, Johnson was shocked
by this information, and he immediately had the documents published in major
newspapers, including the New York Times (Frank, The Conspiracy
Against Jefferson Davis, pp. 37-38).

The same Republican-controlled Congress that
imposed Reconstruction on the South also sanctioned official discrimination
against the American Indians in the West and permitted them to be segregated
from the rest of society. One textbook, edited by Civil War scholar Bruce
Catton and others, puts it this way:

The same Congress
that devised Radical Reconstruction . . . approved strict segregation and
inequality for the Indian of the West. (Catton et al, editors, The National
Experience: A History of the United States, Second Edition, New York:
Harcourt, Brace, & World, 1968, p. 416)

The Abolitionists, Slavery, and the South

The conduct of the Northern abolitionists is
rarely questioned because their ultimate goal, the emancipation of the slaves,
was undeniably noble and praiseworthy. But does a worthy goal justify any and
all means to achieve it, even if those means include the use of egregious
falsehoods and violence? Granted, it's tragic and frustrating when immoral
institutions or evil practices are protected by law, either expressly in the
Constitution, by legislative acts, or by court rulings. However, the proper way
to remedy such situations is to change the law or to reverse the court ruling,
not to resort to inflammatory slander and violence. Slavery was an institution
that was protected from federal intervention by the Constitution. Even Lincoln
said repeatedly the Constitution prohibited the federal government from
abolishing slavery. In 1835 the House of Representatives voted 201 to 7 that
Congress had no constitutional authority to interfere with slavery. There were
only two ways to legally abolish slavery, and that was by each state voting to
end slavery within its borders or by the passage of a constitutional amendment
banning slavery in every state. The abolitionists realized it would be many
years before slavery could be abolished by either of these two processes.
Therefore, many of them, if not most of them, resorted to spreading grossly
misleading attacks on the South, and some of them even began supporting or
launching armed raids into the South that were designed to incite violent slave
rebellions.

Naturally, Southerners resented these
methods. They saw considerable hypocrisy and lawlessness in such assaults. They
knew that slavery had been legal since the founding of the republic. They also
knew that many of the founding fathers had owned slaves, and that slavery had
existed in the North for decades. When the Northern states abolished slavery,
they did so gradually, and in many cases Northern slaveholders had ample time
to sell their slaves.Similarly, when
England abolished slavery, slaveholders were compensated in various ways,
mostly by laws that abolished slavery very gradually, giving slaveholders ample
time to recoup much or all of the cost of their slaves. Yet, Northern
abolitionists, some of whom were Radical Republicans, demanded that the
Southern states free their slaves immediately and without compensation, which
even Lincoln said was unfair. Additionally, the abolitionists made no
suggestion that the Northern states should return any of the large fortunes
they had made from the slave trade or from the sale of Northern slaves to the
South. Even more upsetting to many Southerners were the abolitionists' attempts
to incite slave insurrections. When the British attempted to incite slave
revolts in the American colonies, the colonists greatly resented it.Thomas Jefferson cited this in the
Declaration of Independence as one of the colonists' grievances against the
British.

In many ways one can compare the situation
that existed with slavery to the situation that now exists with abortion.
Abortion is an immoral practice that was legalized by a highly questionable
ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court in 1973. No matter how dubious or unfounded
the court's ruling may have been, the decision established abortion as a
protected practice in American law. As a result, tens of millions of unborn
children have been killed in abortion clinics. In an effort to stop this evil
practice, a few radical anti-abortion activists have resorted to bombing
abortion clinics and to shooting abortion doctors. As much as one might detest
abortion (as I do), one cannot condone these actions. In terms of the cost in
human lives, abortion has caused far, far more death and suffering than did
slavery. There is simply no comparison. Nevertheless, no responsible citizen,
no matter how strongly he or she dislikes abortion, condones the bombing of
abortion clinics or the shooting of abortion doctors. Similarly, although I
certainly admire the Northern abolitionists for their opposition to slavery, I
cannot condone some of their methods, especially their armed raids into the
South.

Few nations or peoples respond positively
when they're subjected to false accusations and unfair criticism, and
especially when they're subjected to armed raids. Tilley expressed the view of
many Southerners that slavery could have been abolished peacefully and that
some of the abolitionists' methods only made the situation worse:

The record has
disclosed that prior to the onslaught of the abolitionists, gradual
emancipation was in the making. As a matter of course, it was not to be
accomplished overnight. Beyond question, it would require a plan of just
compensation to those on whom would fall the financial loss. . . . After all is
said, the best blood of the South knew then, as its descendants know now, that
slavery was inherently, incurably evil, an economic and moral anachronism.
Slavery and the ideals of freedom which inspired the founders of the nation
were wholly incompatible conceptions. No system of human bondage, be it ever so
humane, could have long endured the blinding light of American civilization and
Christianity.

Time was required.
Time is a potent problem solver. . . . Time would have wrought the extirpation
[elimination] of human enslavement. The march of progress, intellectual, social,
and spiritual, could not long have tolerated the barrier of such a stumbling
block.

That the ugliest
blot on American life is forever gone from these shores no individual
Southerner regrets. It is just possible, however, that he may be indulged the privilege
to submit that, in light of all the facts, the method of its going was
transparently unjustified and unfair. (The Coming of the Glory, pp.
46-47)

On an aside note, it should be observed that
the South’s anger over the attempts to incite slave revolts was a major reason
that Confederate leaders strongly objected when the federal government began to
use former slaves in the Union forces that were invading and ravaging the
Southern states. Few textbooks mention the fact that Union forces often compelled
slaves and former slaves to fight in the Union army.Nor do many textbooks explain that Union soldiers frequently took
slaves away from their farms and plantations against their will. Confederate
leaders, and most Southerners as well, viewed the Union army’s use of former
slaves as a federally sanctioned slave revolt. From their viewpoint, since
those slaves had either been stolen or had run away, they still belonged to
their masters and had no legal right to be soldiers or to take up arms against
Southern citizens. Slavery was still legal in the South, and it was still legal
in the four Union slave states. Yet, Union armies didn’t invade and devastate
Northern slave states, only Southern slave states. Of course, on the other
hand, one can certainly sympathize with those former slaves who joined the
Union army in the hope of freeing their fellow blacks who were still being held
as slaves in the South. If I had been in their position, I may very well have
done the same thing.But I can also
understand the Confederate position on the matter.It should be kept in mind that the American colonists greatly
resented the British attempt to recruit slaves to fight against them in the
Revolutionary War.The British offered
freedom to American slaves who would fight on their side, and they encouraged
slaves to sabotage the colonial war effort.Many thousands of slaves flocked to British lines, and several thousand
of them fought for the British.At the
end of the war, at least 18,000 former slaves accompanied British troops as
they evacuated New York, Charleston, Savannah, and other cities.

What If the Confederacy Had Survived?

Although I don't support secession in our
day, I don't agree with the view that it would have been a catastrophe if the
Confederacy had survived. The claim is sometimes heard that if the South had
remained independent, we could not have defeated Nazi Germany and Japan in
World War II. Yet, England and America, though separate nations after the
Revolutionary War, were able to work together to defeat Hitler and Tojo.
There's no reason that the U.S.A. and the C.S.A. could not have worked together
to defeat the fascist threat.

The Confederate States and the United States
could have worked together in numerous areas for the benefit of all Americans,
North and South. All the states still would have been American states, but with
somewhat different laws in certain cases. The borders could have remained open.
Trade and business could have flowed freely between the two nations. An
independent South, freed from the protectionist trade policies of the North,
could have traded directly with Europe and undoubtedly would have grown even
more prosperous than she was before the war. Hopefully, Northern citizens would
have seen the benefits of lower tariffs and would have insisted that their
leaders adopt such policies. (Instead, high tariffs remained in place for
decades after the war.)

If the Confederacy had survived, abortion
most likely would not have been legalized in the Southern states; taxes would
have been much lower in the South; no federal income tax would have been
imposed on the Southern states; prayer and Bible reading and the posting of the
Ten Commandments would have remained in Southern schools; Southern anti-sodomy
laws would not have been swept aside by an amoral U.S. Supreme Court; and sick
"virtual" child pornography would not have been legalized as
"protected free speech" by that same amoral U.S. Supreme Court.

We should keep in mind that the Confederate
states and their citizens were American too. After all, they comprised the
Confederate States of America. They still revered our founding fathers. In
fact, they saw themselves as preserving and defending the principles of the
founders. The official seal of the Confederacy featured George Washington.
Confederate postage stamps bore the images of Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and
Andrew Jackson.

If the Confederacy had not been invaded but
had been allowed to exist in peace, the relations between all the states would
have been nearly identical to how they had been before secession, and the
citizens of the states could have remained "one people" in every
important sense. Similarly, if the U.S. were to announce tomorrow that it was
withdrawing from the United Nations, how would this change the relations
between the people and the governments of, let's say, America and England?
Would it have any meaningful impact on the millions of British-American
friendships? Would it have any meaningful impact on the relations between
British and American families that are related to each other? Would our leaving
the United Nations prevent us from working on a joint space-station project
with the Russians, as we've been doing for years? Would it prevent us from
continuing the close trade and business relationships that we have with Canada
and England? Would it mean we could no longer have virtually open borders with
Canada? Obviously, the answer to all these questions is no. These aren't exact
analogies, but they're fairly close to the mark. It's hard to imagine now, but
in the days before the Civil War the average citizen had very little contact
with the federal government. Why? Because back then the federal government was
much, much smaller than it is today. The states performed the great majority of
the vital functions of government.

"We Lost Too Much": The War’s
Impact on Our Form of Government

The North's invasion and subjugation of the
South destroyed the type of Union that the founding fathers established. We
went from a Union in which the federal government's powers were strictly
limited to a Union in which the federal government could dominate the states
and control functions that were originally reserved to the states. We went from
a Union where the federal government was prohibited from using force against a state
to a Union where the federal government invaded and crushed eleven states. We
went from a Union with a limited federal government and very low taxes to a
Union with a huge federal government and much higher taxes. Basically, the only
functions the federal government leaves to the states are those that it simply
doesn't want to perform. McPherson explains how the relationship between the
average American and the national government was changed because of the Civil
War:

The Internal
Revenue Act of 1862 taxed almost everything but the air northerners breathed. .
. . The law also created a Bureau of Internal Revenue, which remained a
permanent part of the federal government. . . . The relationship of the
American taxpayer to the government was never again the same. . . .

The old federal
republic in which the national government had rarely touched the average
citizen except through the post office gave way to a more centralized polity
that taxed the people directly and created an internal revenue bureau to collect
these taxes, drafted men into the army, expanded the jurisdiction of federal
courts, created a national currency and a national banking system, and
established the first national agency for social welfare. . . . Eleven of the
first twelve amendments to the Constitution had limited the powers of the
national government; six of the next seven, beginning with the Thirteenth
Amendment in 1865, vastly expanded those powers at the expense of the states. (The
Battle Cry of Freedom, pp. 447-448, 859)

And:

The Civil War
marked a decisive turn in the nature of American nationality. Buried forever
was the notion of the Union as a voluntary confederation of sovereign states.
The word "Union" gradually gave way to "nation". . . . The
war strengthened the national government at the expense of the states. Before
1861, only the post office among federal agencies touched directly the lives of
most Americans. Citizens paid their taxes to local or state governments and
settled most of their disputes in state courts. For money, they used the notes
of banks chartered by state legislatures. When war came in 1861, the President
called first on the state militia. State governors took the lead in recruiting,
equipping, and officering the volunteer regiments. But the centralizing
pressures of war changed all this. By 1863 the War Department prescribed
enlistment quotas for states and drafted men directly into the army if states
failed to meet the quotas. The President declared martial law and stationed
soldiers in every state, where their powers of detention superseded those of
state courts. The United States government levied a host of direct taxes and
created an internal revenue bureau to collect them. (Ordeal By Fire, p.
485)

For all practical purposes the Tenth
Amendment, which reserves all unspecified powers to the states and to the
people, was abolished by the North's victory. Former Secretary of the Interior
Gale Norton came under attack during her confirmation hearings because she had
dared to say in a 1996 speech that "we lost too much" in the way of
states rights because of the Civil War. In her speech, Norton, who was then the
Attorney General of Colorado, said the following:

I recall, after I
had just gone through this massive battle with the EPA on state sovereignty and
states rights, visiting the east coast. For the first time, I had the
opportunity to wander through one of those Civil War graveyards. I remember
seeing this column that was erected in one of those graveyards. It said in
memory of all the Virginia soldiers who died in defense of the sovereignty of
their state. It really took me aback. Sure, I had been filing briefs and I
thought that was pretty brave. And then there were times we looked beyond the
substance. When we looked at the decision making process. And understood the
10th Amendment was part of that separation of powers. It was part of what was
supposed to guarantee that our government would remain limited. What would
guarantee our freedom? Again, we certainly had bad facts in that case where we
were defending state sovereignty by defending slavery.

But we lost too
much. We lost the idea that the states were to stand against the Federal
government gaining too much power over our lives. That is the point I think we
need to reappreciate. We need to remind ourselves and remind the political
debate that part of the reason the states need to be able to make their own
decisions is to provide that check in our Federal system against too much power
going to Washington. ("Rediscovering the 10th Amendment," delivered
at the Stevinson Center's Annual Summer Symposium, Vail, Colorado, August 24,
1996)

Jefferson Davis believed the North's denial
of the Southern states' desire to peacefully leave the Union was a repudiation
of the original form of our government, and he noted that secession was in no
way a hostile act:

Secession, on the
other hand, was the assertion of the inalienable right of a people to change
their government. . . . Under our form of government, and the cardinal
principles upon which it was founded, it should have been a peaceful remedy.
The withdrawal of a state from a league has no revolutionary or insurrectionary
characteristic. The government of the state remains unchanged as to all
internal affairs. It is only its external or confederate relations that are
altered. To term this action of a sovereign a "rebellion" is a gross
abuse of language. So is the flippant phrase which speaks of it as an appeal to
the "arbitrament of the sword" [i.e., trying to settle an issue by
force]. In the late contest, in particular, there was no appeal by the seceding
states to the arbitrament of arms. There was on their part no invitation or
provocation to war. They stood in the attitude of self-defense, and were
attacked for merely exercising a right guaranteed by the original terms of the
compact. . . . The man who defends his house against attack cannot with any
propriety be said to have submitted the question of his right to it to the
arbitrament of arms. . . .

The invasions of
the Southern states, for purposes of coercion, were in violation of the written
Constitution, and the attempt to subjugate sovereign states, under the pretext
of "preserving the Union," was alike offensive to law, good morals,
and the proper use of language. The Union was the voluntary junction of free
and independent states; to subjugate any of them was to destroy the constituent
parts, and necessarily, therefore, must be the destruction of the Union itself.
(The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, Volume 1, pp. 157,
379)

The Right of Secession

What about the right of secession? Did the
South have the right to secede? Thomas Jefferson clearly indicated he would
allow a state to leave the Union, even if he didn't agree with its reasons for
wanting to separate. President John Tyler likewise believed a state had the
right to leave the Union. So did President John Quincy Adams. The Northern
Federalists' Hartford Convention declared in 1814 that a state had the right to
secede in cases of "absolute necessity" (Alan Brinkley, Richard
Current, Frank Freidel, and T. Harry Williams, American History: A Survey,
Eighth Edition, New York: McGraw-Hill, Inc., 1991, p. 230). None other than
President Ulysses S. Grant (1868-1876), who was also the commanding general of
all Union armies at the end of the war, said he believed the founding fathers
probably would have allowed the South to go in peace. Grant stated,

If they had
foreseen it, the probabilities are they would have sanctioned the right of a
State or States to withdraw rather than that there should be war between
brothers. (The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, Old Saybrook,
Connecticut: Konecky & Konecky, 1992, reprint, p. 131)

Grant also said he believed that if any of
the original thirteen states had attempted to secede from the Union under the
Articles of Confederation, their right to do so would not have been challenged.
Said Grant,

If there had been
a desire on the part of any single State to withdraw from the compact at any
time while the number of States was limited to the original thirteen, I do not
suppose there would have been any to contest the right, no matter how much the
determination might have been regretted. (The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S.
Grant, p. 130)

The Declaration of Independence says people
have the right to sever existing political ties with other peoples and to take
their place among the family of nations.It also says governments derive "their just powers from the consent
of the governed" and that people have the right to form a new government
when they believe they need to do so, "laying its foundation on such
principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most
likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."It may be said with complete accuracy that the Declaration of
Independence is a secession document.Our founding fathers signed the declaration in order to proclaim their
independence from England and to declare that they had a natural, God-given
right to break their political ties with England and to establish their own
government.If governments derive their
just powers from the consent of the governed, then the Confederacy was
certainly a legitimate government, since Southern citizens overwhelmingly
supported secession and the formation of their states into the Confederate
States of America.

This is just a small part of the evidence
that shows the South had valid grounds for believing it had the right to
peacefully leave the Union. In offering this evidence, I don’t mean to imply
that I support secession in our day. My intent is merely to show that the South
had just cause for believing secession was legal. A thorough treatment of the
legality of secession can be found in attorney John Remington Graham’s book A
Constitutional History of Secession (Louisiana: Pelican Publishing, 2002).

The Devastation of the South

One cannot understand why many Southerners
and others feel the war was unjust without understanding the extent of the
devastation that federal forces inflicted on the South during the war. When a
whole region experiences the kind of devastation and brutality that the South
suffered, accounts of such wrongs are passed down from parents to children for
many generations. Today nearly all textbooks either ignore or gloss over the
cruel type of warfare that federal armies waged in the South and the amount of
destruction and suffering those armies caused. So, before I conclude this
article, I'd like to take just a moment to examine the nature and consequences
of the devastation that federal forces inflicted on the South.

Kenneth Davis:

Along with the
horrible number of deaths and crippling wounds, much of the seceded South was
left in smoldering ruins. The Southern economy was practically nonexistent. The
dollar value of the destruction was staggering. Although cotton resumed its significant
position almost immediately, it was another twenty-five years before the number
of livestock in the South returned to prewar levels. . . .

William T. Sherman
[a Union general] always maintained that the devastatingly destructive war he
had waged on the Confederacy shortened the war and saved soldiers' lives. His
good intentions went unappreciated by the victims of his ruthlessness. For many
along his path, after Sherman's troops departed, there was literally nothing
left on which to support a family. Houses were looted. Those animals that were
not taken by the Union troops were killed. Under Sherman's "scorched
earth" policy, any item that could be used for farming or manufacturing
was destroyed, the grim "justice" for what Sherman viewed as treason.

In the aftermath
of the war, the entire Confederacy, save sections west of the Mississippi that
had been spared the massive battles, was devastated--physically, economically,
even spiritually. The postwar South was probably worse off than Europe after either
of the world wars of this century. Because of Sherman's notorious destruction
of the southern railroads, many of Lee's defeated soldiers had to walk home
from Virginia. Many found that their homes had been burned. In some cases,
entire towns and even whole counties had been evacuated. (Don't Know Much
About the Civil War, pp. 411, 425)

Randall and Donald:

On the nature and
extent of devastation at the South the historian's sources present a sad
record. By the end of the war the eleven seceding states had 32 percent fewer
horses than in 1860, 30 percent fewer mules, 35 percent fewer cattle, 20
percent fewer sheep, and 42 percent fewer swine. . . . Omitting slave property
from his calculations, Professor Sellers concludes that "southern wealth
in 1860 had shrunk in value at the end of the war by 43 percent". . . .

The South had been
broken by the war. Lands were devastated. Proud plantations were now mere
wrecks. Billions of economic value in slaves had been wiped away by
emancipation measures without that compensation which Lincoln himself had
admitted to be equitable. . . . Accumulated capital had disappeared. Banks were
shattered; factories were dismantled; the structure of business intercourse had
crumbled. In Atlanta, Columbia, Mobile, Richmond, and many other places great
havoc had been wrought by fire.

The interior of
South Carolina, in the wake of Sherman's march, "looked for many miles
like a broad black streak of ruin and desolation--the fences all gone; lonesome
smoke stacks, surrounded by dark heaps of ashes and cinders, marking the spots
where human habitations had stood; the fields along the road wildly overgrown
by weeds, with here and there a sickly looking patch of cotton or corn
cultivated by negro squatters. In the city of Columbia . . . a thin fridge of
houses encircled a confused mass of charred ruins of dwellings and business
buildings, which had been destroyed by a sweeping conflagration." The
Tennessee valley, according to the account of an English traveler,
"consists for the most part of plantations in a state of semi-ruin, and
plantations of which the ruin is for the present total and complete. . . . The
trail of war is visible throughout the valley in burnt up gin-houses, ruined
bridges, mills, and factories, of which latter the gable walls only are left
standing, and in large tracts of once cultivated land stripped of every vestige
of fencing. . . . Borne down by losses, debts, and accumulating taxes, many who
were once the richest among their fellows have disappeared from the scene, and
few have yet to take their place." (The Civil War and Reconstruction,
pp. 517, 543-544)

McPherson:

The war not only
killed one-quarter of the Confederacy's white men of military age. It also
killed two-fifths of southern livestock, wrecked half of the farm machinery,
ruined thousands of miles of railroad, left scores of thousands of farms and
plantations in weeds and disrepair. . . . Two-thirds of assessed southern
wealth vanished in the war. The wreckage of the southern economy caused the
1860s to become the decade of least economic growth in American history before
the 1930s. As measured by the census, southern agricultural and manufacturing
capital declined by 46 percent between 1860 and 1870, while northern capital
increased by 50 percent. In 1860 the southern states had contained 30 percent
of the national wealth; in 1870, only 12 percent. (The Battle Cry of Freedom,
pp. 818-819)

Simkins:

When surrender
stopped the invader, physical destruction was apparent in many places. Lands
were devastated, plantations wrecked. Accumulated capital had disappeared in
worthless stocks, bonds, and currency. The banks had failed; factories had been
dismantled; and the structure of business intercourse had crumbled. Two billion
dollars invested in slaves had been wiped out, without the compensation which
Lincoln himself had regarded as equitable. . . . Cotton worth $30,000,000 had
been confiscated by federal Treasury agents. . . .

The eighty miles
from Harpers Ferry to New Market were described by a Virginia farmer as
"almost a desert." "We had," he explained, "no cattle,
hogs, sheep, or horses or anything else. The fences were all gone. . . . The
barns were all burned; chimneys standing without houses, and houses standing
without roofs, or doors, or windows". . . .

In December 1865,
an estimated 500,000 white people in three states of the lower South were
without the necessities of life, and some of them even starved. . . .

Fifteen years
after the war only the frontier states of Texas, Arkansas, Mississippi, and
Florida had as many acres under cultivation as in 1860. . . .

The spirit of
vengeance was strong in the victorious North at first. . . .

Because
Southerners refused to be friendly, the federal army of occupation resorted to
irritating retaliations. Women required to go to military headquarters for any
favor were forced to take ironclad oaths of national loyalty. The wearing of
Confederate uniforms was forbidden and when this order was enforced among men
who had no other clothes, scenes of unforgivable humiliation resulted. . . .

Church buildings
were seized and turned over to Northern denominations, and ministers were not
allowed to preach unless they agreed to conduct "loyal services, pray for
the President of the United States, and for Federal victories." Direct
refusal of Protestant Episcopal clergymen to substitute in their liturgy the
name of the President of the United States for that of the President of the
Confederate States resulted in the closing of churches and the dispersal of
congregations.

In addition, there
was the burden of discriminatory war taxes and the confiscation laws of
Congress. Federal Treasury agents threaded their way through the occupied areas
seizing 3 million out of the 5 million bales of cotton which had not been
destroyed. They corruptly enriched themselves. "I am sure," said the
Secretary of the Treasury, "that I sent some honest agents South; but it
sometimes seems very doubtful whether any of them remained honest for very
long." A special tax of from 2.5 to 3 cents a pound on cotton yielded the
federal treasury $68,000,000. Because of its effects on the economy of a
prostrate region, this levy was called by the United States Commissioner of
Agriculture "disastrous and disheartening in the extreme." As soon as
the federal troops got a foothold in the South, property was seized and sold
for nonpayment under the Direct Tax Act. (A History of the South, pp.
247-251, original emphasis)

In conclusion, I hope that in this article I
have provided some balance to the common, and I believe inaccurate and unfair,
descriptions of the antebellum South, of the Confederacy, and of the events
that led to the Civil War. When judged by any fair, reasonable comparison, the
South was just as deserving of its independence as were the original thirteen
colonies. Similarly, the South had just as much right as did the North to be
governed by a government of its own choosing. The Confederacy had just as much
right to exist as did any other nation of its day.

It's been said that those who fail to learn
from the mistakes of history are bound to repeat them. But how can we learn
from history if our version of history is markedly one-sided and incomplete?
Sometimes the facts of history can be unsettling, especially when those facts
have been widely suppressed. Robert Catlett Cave expressed my feelings about
discussing such facts:

I acknowledge . .
. the obligation to heal dissensions, allay passion, and promote good feeling;
but I do not believe that good feeling should be promoted at the expense of truth
and honor. I sincerely desire that there may be between the people of the North
and the people of the South increasing peace and amity, and that, in the spirit
of genuine fraternity, they may work together for the prosperity and glory of
their common country; but I do not think the Southern people should be expected
to sacrifice the truth of history to secure that end. (The Men in Gray,
Crawfordville, Georgia: Ruffin Flag Company, 1997, reprint, p. 17)

Michael
T. Griffith holds a Bachelor of Science degree from Excelsior College in
Albany, New York, two Associate in Applied Science degrees from the Community
College of the Air Force, and an Advanced Certificate of Civil War Studies and
a Certificate of Civil War Studies from Carroll College in Wisconsin. He is a
two-time graduate of the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, in
Arabic and Hebrew, and of the U.S. Air Force Technical Training School in San
Angelo, Texas. He is the author of four books on Mormonism and ancient texts,
and of one book on the John F. Kennedy assassination. He has completed advanced
Hebrew programs at Haifa University in Israel and at the Spiro Institute in
London, England. He is currently pursuing a Master's degree in Religious
Studies from The Catholic Distance University in Hamilton, Virginia.